How good is Google?

First off; I am neither long or short Google stock, Google is set as my homepage and is the search engine of choice for me, and 'Blogger' hosts this Blog - in summary, I like (love!) using Google. However, I was reviewing my advertisement expenses and had foolishly neglected to monitor my campaign costs [a seperate issue to do with Adwords Dominator which hadn't picked up on one of my new campaigns and so I 'forgot' about it; now I am back on the web end monitoring and no longer using the Dominator software] which led to me running up a relatively hefty bill (emphasis on the 'relatively'). On paper, my ads had generated a handy 250 click throughs - but unfortunately not one conversion. Part of the blame sits on my end, i.e. a poor sales pitch, but I do know of at least one subscriber who joined because of my Google ad so it is not a total dud. Unfortunately, it is becoming harder for me to justify the continued cost of using Adwords to promote my site when the vast majority of clicks fail to generate as much as a lead. On the flip side, I was an Adsense user too, but my initial strong income trickled to nothing and at some level there must be Adsense fatigue given every site within the same general interest (e.g. financial blogs) rotates the same ads. Now the more astute promoters have identified the ads which generate the most income and cut those from rotation which don't bring in the moolah (a good feature of Adsense), but with the blogosphere ever expanding will Google be looking to drive revenue from sheer mass of exposure (not necessarily quality clicks, just quantity of clicks)? and if so, how will it address the issue of declining advertiser returns?

Now - my experience is not a reflection of what big companies get out of using Google (which must be quite a bit given some of the costs-per-click for some key words - play around in Overture and look at keywords like 'retirement' to see what the top 5 are paying), but investors are always best with going with what they like and in the last couple of months I am not liking what Google is doing for me.

All of this is just an opinion, and if this blog disappears suddenly you will know why!