Google: Paid Clicks Up 34% While Cost Per Click Down 8% YoY

Google just posted their Q4 2011 earnings resulting in a massive quarter but not meeting expectations of investors. In fact, Google’s stock is down over 9% in after hours trading.

That being said, part of those earning results showed that paid clicks on Google’s network is up 34% year over year but cost per click (CPC) is down 8% year over year. In other words, more people are clicking on ads, but those clicks are costing advertisers less money per click.

The paid clicks also increased from Q3 to Q4 by 17%, while CPC dropped 8% from Q3 to Q4.

  • Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, increased approximately 34% over the fourth quarter of 2010 and increased approximately 17% over the third quarter of 2011.

  • Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our Network members, decreased approximately 8% over the fourth quarter of 2010 and decreased approximately 8% over the third quarter of 2011.

This lead to Google increasing revenue year over year by 25%.

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Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Business Issues


About The Author: is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here.

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  • http://about.me/alexedlund Alex Edlund

    This confirms what we have been seeing in the travel industry as well. More clicks, large increases in clicks from tablets and other mobile phones while CPC’s have remained steady or dropped. For established players this is a good time to be aggressive with your accounts.

    Unfortunately, I have not seen the same development with Yahoo/Bing. On the contrary it seems that CPC’s are continuing to rise since the alliance while clicks volume is stagnant. Google is in a good place right now.

  • http://www.danmozgai.com/ Dan Mozgai

    34% is a massive increase. I wonder where that comes from. Is it from more people using Google, or having more ads in more places and on more devices (like mobile), or are paid ads simply more attractive to searches than organic results these days?

  • Flemming Kaasgaard

    Wouldn’t it be a fair assumption that a lot of the increase in clicks is non-us, from emerging markets, which could explain a big chunk of the increase, and explain the drop in CPC – often less mature markets will have lower CPC’s, especially if it’s in i.e. eastern europe, India or the like.

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