This week, Google announced earnings and the buzz around the industry is that they missed their marks. Google blames the results on the purchase of Nest.
But I am always interested in seeing if there were more clicks on search ads the previous quarter and the cost per click changes.
Google said paid clicks dropped about 1% from last quarter, but was up 26% from the previous year. While the CPC, cost per click "remained constant" from last quarter, but decreased 9% from the previous year.
So while CPC prices have been dropping every quarter on average, this is the first time the paid clicks themselves have dropped from the previous quarter.
While Google made $10.55 billion in Q4 2013 on site revenues, Google made $10.47 billion in Q1 2014. Which I believe was the first time that number was down in a long time or maybe every (I just checked the past several earnings reports.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.