Once again, Alphabet makes more profits with Google Cloud, and Google Ads also continues to grow – IT Pro – News

And it continues to pay off for many companies.
However, the question remains for how long.

Google has made a number of aggressive adjustments to Google Ads, which in particular have raised prices for advertisers. I manage Google Ads campaigns for a number of clients and for all of them I have seen an almost linear increase in costs / decrease in ROI since July 2022.
Competition between advertisers is actively encouraged and as a result costs per click are increasing.

The article you reference in the Reporter makes a number of interesting points, but focuses on a number of examples where a lot of money is being spent unnecessarily.

Such as advertising on your company name.
If someone is already searching for that name, they have already decided to go to your website.
The first visible link will then be clicked.
If this is an ad for your website, which also appears in the top 3 organic ads, then it is actually a waste of money. Such advertising statistically has an impressive cost per conversion ratio, and is an extremely useful tool for marketing departments and companies to “prove” how effective their services are.

The bigger point, as you also pointed out, is that companies are so afraid of losing customers/profits that they keep paying beyond what is reasonable. Sometimes they rely so heavily on Google to be found online that they simply accept the costs. Even when I explain to my clients that some search terms are essentially a cost item that rarely results in anything because they’re not specific enough, they still want to be “always” at the top of the results.