True that car insurance ads deliver little or no value - as in the end you always end up at one of the major carriers - and the price is no lower than if you ha

True that car insurance ads deliver little or no value - as in the end you always end up at one of the major carriers - and the price is no lower than if you had gone to them directly. The restaurant example assumes that you can continue to fool your customers with overpriced wine and low quality food. If you could stay in business long enough with that strategy you don't really need to run PPC ads! But these two examples completely distort the way Google's Ads are used by the vast majority of businesses - to whom they can and do deliver real customers and value. This includes the vast majority of cases - the long tail of search traffic that converts well for niche products and services that have little or no other way to directly market or get customers. When used correctly, Google Adwords is a godsend for such businesses. This could be a maker of high-end custom furniture cabinets in a little town in the middle of nowhere, or a small software company in a small town in India that has produced a killer app to learn Yoga, or a software developer in New Zealand, that has developed the perfect SaaS app for monitoring your server, and so on. These are the businesses that Google empowers - by giving them access to a potential worldwide market for their products.