Google looks at the specific search, which could be “home windows for the elderly” just as easily as it could be “home windows and doors”. Those are two very different searches. Google knows this; bid management systems don’t.

I tried out one of those major bidding platforms in a head-to-head test against Target CPA. We split our campaigns in a fair way, each had about half our budget and similar campaign types. The bidding platform didn’t even come close to Google’s performance on a broad match. They were pathetically bad in comparison. So bad that we started pulling campaigns back to Google after a few weeks. We ended up giving them a full two months to test, and they couldn’t beat Google in a single campaign.