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Yeah I feel you on this. Anecdotal, but I’ve had plenty of Google searches that ended in what technically counts as ad conversions, but the exact same link is only three items below. The only difference for them is that I clicked on the ad version because it is near the top typically.

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Keyword advertising for your company’s own name is a well known mistake: there’s no reason to serve ads to people who are already searching for you. If anything the high conversion rate on that sort of keyword is an argument against… using conversion rates as a metric, haha.

Used to be a mistake. Now it's pretty clear you have to pay-to-play to get top billing on SERPs.

But keyword advertising on your competitor's name looks very dishonest. I search for company A but get B as top result.

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