Otherwise, we would have had to click non-stop to support google's growth.

Google's explanation mean strictly nothing. Probably, they have no idea themselves of what percentage of the clicks are voluntary or not. But ultimately, the revenue should be a good indicator, because if they just raise the price of clicks, companies can and will go somewhere else. The dog-eat-dog mentality of Silicon Valley insures that brand new start-ups will pounce on any weakness they can find in the google armor.

Well said.

I understand that people want to invest in company and expect cash for investment. Problem is that value of company is mostly set up by professional gamblers, I mean traders, that want to make quick buck instead caring for dividend, well being of company, etc. That's the reason companies that make quite a lot of cash (MSFT springs to mind) but don't grow as predicted loose value over long term. It's silly as they actually grow - just slower than predicted. That's common flaw of trade markets, they can destroy perfectly healthy company because of some speculative plays.

Maybe people are clicking less because they don't have as much money to spend these past few months? Maybe I'm wrong but if Google, and e-commerce, are as pervasive as the media makes them out to be, they must be feel the same effects as brick-and-mortar and mail order.

Google clicks is a total scam. I figured I'd give this a try when it first came out - and blew through $100 at 2 cents a click in a matter of 36 hours and got ABSOLUTELY ZERO business out of it. Clickfraud is alive and well at Google.

Mike, how can you judge that 'Clickfraud is alive and well at Google' when you haven't used it since Adwords came out 5 years ago?

Grundy & Miami: RTFA.

Click rates are just climbing slower, but they are still increasing. As others have pointed out, maturation and saturation will tend to do that.

Miami Mike: Perhaps the trick to making good business is to be careful about the target phrasing you use. Undoubtedly some businesses are less suited to click advertising than others. If you got the clicks for 2c each, they were probably pretty low quality.

Who does this? I don't know anyone who clicks on ads. Are there any figures on the percentage of people who actually click?

"unintentional clicks," ??

How many people do this? Are they incredibly clumsy or just randomly clicking as they move their mouse around?

I do this, generally to companies I don't like (for whatever reason).

When I see one of their ad's I click on it and it makes me feel warm and fuzzy knowing that they just paid for my click.

Sometimes if I'm really drunk I'll go all the way through their checkout process and bail at the last minute. That kind of thing drives the web guys nuts. It works best with smaller companies that don't have a lot of money to waste and that spend too much time on analytics, but it's still fun on mega-corps too.

When the mega-corp sends you an email asking why you bailed you can say really funny stuff like "I was concerned about the security of your site" or "the experience was horrible" or "why are you sending me emails? I got tired of fucking around with your site and just ordered over the phone". Sometimes they'll even give you free stuff if you make your experience (or theirs) miserable enough.

@ Charles - Slower is the problem here Chuck, and the point of the article. If growth rates aren't completely through the roof and totally unsustainable then the company is a piece of crap and is doomed. Sell quick and buy something for the long haul, like railroads.

In a backwards kind of way, the article says that the number of people clicking on Google ads increased.

Not a serious problem is it?

If Google wish to get people to click on their adverts, they will have to get more clever about guessing what People are Searching for. As things stand, they are only Luke Warm. There is still plenty of scope to improve their search engine, without resorting to taping into peoples' internet connections at the ISP level. There will be an ultimate limit to how many ads people will click on anyway. So they had better spend more effort on Intelligence, the Appliance of Science.

My Adsense earnings have increased since Christmas. Google's loss is my gain. :)

"Google clicks is a total scam. I figured I'd give this a try when it first came out - and blew through $100 at 2 cents a click in a matter of 36 hours and got ABSOLUTELY ZERO business out of it. Clickfraud is alive and well at Google."

I'd guess that this rate of return is pretty typical for web advertising.

Anyone here actually want to comment from experience on the efficiency of that particular marketing dollar?

"slowdown in paid click growth"

Rates don't slow -- they decrease.

Slowing is rate decreasing.

And given that in this case "growth" means rate of increase

"slowdown in paid click growth" = decrease in rate of rate of increase.

Meaningless meaningless meaningless!

Please don't confuse your less intelligent readers with this poor logic. (see "Clicks down? Imagine that!)

If that's the case why are they going to allow non-brand owners to buy links against branded keywords from May 5? If I search for "BMW", I expect to get results related to BMW, not to anyone who decides that bidding on BMW is a good idea.

And @Solomon Grundy... what the f*ck is wrong with you? You clearly have too much time on your hands, and lying to companies you don't like is really going to make them improve their service isn't it?

"blew through $100 at 2 cents a click in a matter of 36 hours and got ABSOLUTELY ZERO business out of it."

$100 spent on ANY kind fo marketing is unlikely to give you any significant yield. If you bought $100 worth of business cards, you'd still have to spend many more hundreds dollars disbributing them. $100 would get you the smallest of small newspaper ads.

To be brutal, I don't spending $100 represents a siginifcant effort at exploring an advertising medium to get right result. I'm not suprised it didn'ty work for you.

The biggest problem with Google Adwords as far as I can see is that competitive markets get bid right up to (and sometimes beyond!) the point where the clicks become uneconomical. You have work *REALLY* hard to make sure you make the best of every click, or somebody else will scalp you!

Think about how you got here:

Did you create a web page with your favourite sites, and set you browser to default to that page? No chance of a newbie doing that.

Did you add the page to your bookmarks? A challenging operation for a newbie. Some might accidently do this. Eventually they find how to recall a page from a bookmark, but by the time they do, they have hundreds of bookmarks, and it is too much effort to find the right one.

Did you type part of the URL and let the browser complete it? Newbies have only one hand, it is glued to the mouse. They ignore the URL because it looks a bit technical.

Did you get here from your browser's history? If a newbie can find the history, the good sites are lost in the mass of places they have been.

Did you use a google search? Newbies can somehow find google (I assume the have a google button on their browser). They can get a bunch of links from google, but if they were not looking for Paris, the sites are rarely related to what they were looking for.

In real life, newbies click on some link on the page because they do not know what else they could do.

Well, I have, but very rarely. Only if I see something that really catches my eye. I think the last one was for a school-based IT package running Linux that I hadn't heard of (I do IT in schools, and prefer Linux). And enough people must not only click on the ads but FOLLOW THROUGH WITH A SALE to make it worthwhile, otherwise it would have been consigned to the dot-com bin years ago.

The problem is making them relevant, which for some sites is nearly impossible. Having said that, within a few days of a new page on my site being made for a obscure games console (the GP2X) targetting emulation of old systems, all my Google ads on the page were for related items - MAME ROM's (not sure you should advertise that on Google, to be honest), paid-for emulators, "arcade classics" video games, video game consoles, accessories, places to buy the GP2X, games for the GP2X, etc.

There is no way I could get that sort of advertising anywhere else, because it's such small scale but highly relevant. And people DO click on those, my adsense logs tell me they do and I can see why, for some of them. I really didn't expect Google to pick up much that relevant at all... I have a blog on Blogger that often mentions Linux, uses it as a keyword all the time in articles, is linked to from several Linux projects and I get a Linux-related advert about one in every twenty that I've seen and the rest are usually random rubbish (I once had one for selling horses and I couldn't work out where it had come from, there were no keywords related to that at all).

My brother runs a popular Scouting site and his page is filled with adverts for tent manufacturers, campsites, people who sell maps, compasses, books, all sorts. Not only do they make money from advertising on his site, but they will fight over paying him money to place an ad "just for them" - he gets a phone call from a company about once a month, even though all his ads are now Google ads.

For many years before he started with Google ad's he had a popular webstore who were selling related products advertising on his website and they kept wanting to renew year after year. He makes enough money off the site adverts to keep it running and fund a couple of camps a year for a few dozen kids. But Google ads will pay him more than any one company will risk on just one site (the first round of "bids" after introducing Google ads was funny because the company's were shocked at the price it would cost to supplant the Google ads)

Think about it, if one person a year buys a tent off the store, or even a couple of small pieces of gear, the advertising has paid for itself. With *thousands* of visitors a day, all within a certain demographic, all looking for highly-related information, all potential customers and a vast percentage of them actively seeking out products to buy, that's well worth the payoff. My brother has even found several new companies to buy stuff from for himself (but he couldn't click on their advert because that's against Google policies) that he would never have heard of if their ad hadn't appeared on his own website.

But random Google ads splattered over random pages from which Google can't extract keywords - nobody would ever click them except by accident and then they won't follow through with a sale. It's the targetting that makes the difference, and I've clicked on properly targetted adverts quite a few times when doing searches for companies to purchase from. Although I don't think I've ever hit one of those ones you get in a Google search listing.

I have 10 sites with Google adwords and 11 sites with Yahoo. I make about the same amount of monthly mony from both. (Thank You visitors that click ads!) When I'm on a small site that displays ads, I always make sure to click an ad or two just as a way of saying "thank you".

AdGooroo just released their quarterly research report on Google and Yahoo. It clearly shows that Google's quality algorithm cost them quite a few advertisers since July, but that they bounced back in Q1 (at Yahoo's expense). This seems to support the idea that earnings will be up.

http://www.adgooroo.com/google_gains_advertiser_share.php

These guys normally know what they are talking about, so we will see…