This week Google suffered an embarrassing situation over their quarterly figures, which showed that advertising revenue was falling. Apparently the figures were published early my mistake, but nonetheless it was a huge problem for them. Their search results are out of line with the other SE's, although users are not declining. People still "Google" because they are the market leaders. But before Google Yahoo was the major SE, and MSN, ASK and others all had their time. Has Google peaked? Are they trying to be too clever? Are they trying to be be too many different things? My personal view is that in 5 years time we will be looking at something very different to what we have today. What are your views on this?
Not sure if peaked or not but I think Google has taken some decisions that apparently looks bad from a customer point of view as well. I had very similar view on the same - http://imtips.co/google-profits-drop.html
It is different for those who look to Google to provide advertising revenue to those who are looking to sell something directly, but in the end we are all reliant on visitors. I think that eventually users are going to reailise that they are just being fed ads and large company search results from Google and that they will want more than that. It will not happen overnight but I feel that Google has lost the plot in terms of delivering quality search results because they have taken it too far and instead of creating the level playing field they have spoken of, they have removed the smaller sites from search results or at least pushed them so far down that they can't be seen. History will decide, but in trying to make decisions for users (personal and local search etc) I reckon they are trying to think for their users and users want to think for themselves and will slowly move away to alternatives.
SEO is a very fast industry and undoubtedly one of the biggest online industry and if you look at numbers, PPC is very small compared to SEO. People are ready to spend more on SEO than in PPC. Ideally Google would love to grab their cut from the SEO spends as well and so they are making it more harder for SEO to survive. This would mean people are forced to forget SEO (Like they targeted Toolbar PR) and spend on PPC but this has turn upside down on them only. What it has done is made people to spend less on PPC because now search is not very relevant to the keywords and may be the conversion in PPC has gone down the barrel. I had few PPC campaigns and in September I had my worst conversions and for no reasons. There is nothing that has been done on these website or landing page in recently for such a drop in CTR on those sites and this site has no traffic from SEO and purely PPC traffic. The only reason I could associate for such a drop in conversion is because Google is sending users that are not very related to my keywords and so on October 10th 2012, I just paused all my PPC campaigns. All means All and I would like to take a break for at least 30 days before I retest things.
Wow, that is really interesting that you have temporarily stopped all your PPCs. I am sure others who are experienced as you would have done the same, and that can only further impact on Google's income. If they continue to lose revenue and at the same time users begin to realise that their searches are only offering the big players, we could be about to witness the beginning of the end.
