In tracking ROI I often click back to find where customers are coming from. I always find these only pages with no content. I have yet to find any sales come from these pages, only lost revenue from clicks.

Google can, and could have all along, weeded out the sites, and dumped them. They haven't because they can profit from it - and that's exactly what they'll do. They publicize the excuse (riff raff and poor quality landing pages), then raise the bids.

In our particular case, the keyword I cite with a 9000% increase in 7 hours, is still being bid on...by eBay, and 4 other major shopping sites. Google is a business. At $6 Billion in ad revenue last year, and a forecast growth of 30 - 40% this year, that's obvious. As any business, their focus is on those companies who have multi-million dollar accounts to spend with them.

I wouldn't be surprised to see articles appear soon (if they already haven't) charging Google with "reserving" those phrases for only large, multi-million dollar advertisers, by increasing the minimum bids to levels too costly for small advertisers.

As for "poor user experience", in our case, nothing could be further from the truth. Our landing page URL was a page in our site for the item - the URL contained the phrase - and the only items on that page were a selection of that item.