Paid Search In Decline?

The economy appears to be having an effect on paid search.  If you own Google stock, perhaps you already know that.

7.25% of all search engine traffic to all categories of websites currently comes from paid clicks (Hitwise, May 9, 2009).  Last year, in this same period, 9.84% of all clicks came from paid clicks.

Part of the situation may stem from the fact that more effort is being put into search engine optimization.  It may also be that younger adults simply don’t “see” paid advertisements.  If you are in the affiliate marketing business, you know that banner advertising simply doesn’t deliver like it used to.

Comscore data shows an interesting trend.  In the last two years, searches are up 68%, but the number of users clicking on a pay per click PPC advertisement is up just 18%.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 12:04 am and is filed under Internet Statistics, Pay Per Click Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.