By Terry Van Hone
This article titled Google's Paid Click Business Slipping - ComScore has got to be one of the biggest yawners yet and another indication of a jittery stock market. As to the source.... In 14 years I've yet to see data from comscore that I'm not skeptical of the numbers and the way the data is gathered and possibly skewed by the polled audience or source/process. In fact most of the data on click costs and clicks is not worth the paper it's written on. I never feel it is really that accurate as it isn't based on data from the source it's always collected in a indirect suspect manner.
First lets put this data in it's proper context! That context would be the data is US centric which is hardly a Google growth engine since internet penetration is near saturation as compared to other areas of the world where 3/4 of the world population resides.
Second there was a " bug" in the way the ads are setup on the content network. Basically in the past it was possible to be charged for a click that was clicked around but not on the ad. Basically they shouldn't have been counted in the first place so... this is a good thing for advertisers. My gut tells me that is part of the drop and well... GOOG is down 40% from the top so... IMO, any traffic loss was baked into the price $100 ago! That is also old data, with YouTube coming on stream for vid ads... well the second most trafficed site on the web just got monetized boys! GOOG is a screamming table pounding buy!
posted @ Tuesday, February 26, 2008 3:04 PM