The intentionally deep technical content of the site may be motivated by reasoning backward to your thought process:
Usually it's the technical guys, tasked with researching and finding a product that fits the requirements, who find the site and forward the link to their managers. The managers have no idea what any of it means, but "it looks like good stuff", so "contact them and find out more".
This has been my experience. Of course, that may be a reflection of the self-selecting group of prospects that the site does reach, so your observations are entirely valid!
LOL I have a site that is totally and exclusively devoted to Study Skills. My quality score for the keyword "study skills?" 1/10
Now, I understand what's happening. I haven't loaded up the <h1> tags and stuff. I'm appealing to the people who might be looking for something like this. It's very different from selling umbrellas, but we are forced to fit the same mold.
I think the general conclusion is sound: Having such a dominant company that suffers no ill consequences of its mistakes is bad for small business.
In large it doesn't matter what you're selling anymore for the most part. People are used to thumbing through search results and every company competing in the space is at their fingertips with a single click. It's not like you're the only study site they found, they probably have ten open right now.
You need to have the most appealing intros or people will simply hit X on the tab and move on to someone that does. In short, make absolutely sure it's abundantly clear to a five year old that they've reached the right place within ten seconds or people will go somewhere else.
Also, everyone will be 1/10 qs for study skills. The keyword is far too broad for more than 1% of your ads to be targeted properly. Unless you have thousands of negative keywords I wouldn't go near that one. Google wants ads to be relevant so users will continue to click them. You will be punished severely every time your ad shows up and it's not what the user was looking for
another tip is that if you don't sell a product Adwords is not for you. Pure content sites will be vaporized by the cost vs the revenue you get from people seeing ads on your site :)
In my experience people through AdWords are not technical. Usually how it goes is that the people actually using the software, so the poor saps working in the call center, will get so frustrated with their existing system that they will google "call center software" and let their manager/coworkers know about any good looking alternatives they find.
Once management and IT know about the problem there's usually already a shortlist of software to check out and management makes the final decision.
Indeed it is probably self selection of our markets to a large extent :) but it worked for us. In my current and last company new tools and hardware have been exclusively pushed from below. If management doesn't know there's a problem they won't change anything, and most managers hate being told about problems without solutions in hand
A lot of times, nobody reads these white papers, but there is a huge credibility boost from having them. It says that there's something substantive here. "Sounds like good stuff."
I have seen a lot of companies do this and it's terrible. You get SEO mostly from long form in depth articles and dumping it into a PDF will tank something that would be page 1 to page 5. Google will prefer a well setup blog over a file download ten times out of ten. Unless your whitepaper is a unicorn the search results will go to someone else
The intentionally deep technical content of the site may be motivated by reasoning backward to your thought process:
Usually it's the technical guys, tasked with researching and finding a product that fits the requirements, who find the site and forward the link to their managers. The managers have no idea what any of it means, but "it looks like good stuff", so "contact them and find out more".
This has been my experience. Of course, that may be a reflection of the self-selecting group of prospects that the site does reach, so your observations are entirely valid!