Our latest CPC numbers from August reveal that CPCs in travel are up 14.5% MoM this year. Last year CPCs in travel rose 3.3% during the same time period. This is a good sign as it indicates the sector is continuing to make a recovery.
CPCs in the other sectors are seasonally down. Automotive, Retail and Finance CPCs are 10.5%, -2.3% and -4.4% lower than last month respectively. These drops are inline with the MoM drops we saw in the same time period last year. On a YoY basis however, CPCs are up in all sectors.
Dr. Siddharth Shah
Director, Business Analytics
Hi Sid, I'm not too worried about CTR and QS implications, it's in Google's interests to deal with those issues smartly.
I do think it's likely to create an additional traffic bias towards the top 5 or 6 ads, as people are more likely to type and scan for the most relevant listings, but I don't think (could be totally wrong here) that this will push more traffic to the more generic keywords; I think it will make the tail more important as people see the results get increasingly relevant the more they type.
Your comments about brand implications are particularly interesting. Thankfully when people type in "rimm..." they come right to us...:-)
Posted by: George Michie | September 09, 2010 at 04:38 AM