With Pay Per Click Advertising continuing to drop every month since November 2007, where could things be going.  It is difficult to judge without an annual set of data, but by analysing the changes per month there are several conclusions that could be drawn.

Fewer consumers are clicking on sponsored listings?  Google had 12.7% clicks of overall searches in November 2007 but this had decreased to 10.6% in February 2008.  That is nearly a 16.5% decrease in market share three months later. 

Perhaps they are becoming more relevant?  This argument is always used to justify the never ending increases in Pay Per Click costs to the end user while not explaining the diminishing returns.

The Sponsored listings have a reduced click area since November so that explains it?  This is an easy answer that has been thrown around since late last year but doesn’t carry as much relavance or weight as time goes on.

What this does seem to support is that for the majority of companies-having an integrated strategy implemented into your marketing mix that is inclusive of Organic (Free Search) is going to provide the greatest Return on Investment (ROI) in the long term.  To achieve and manage both short/long term marketing objectives the Organic Search investment model supports the objectives of Managment, Customer Service Levels of Excellence and Sale Targets for Growth.

There are many informative articles and blogs in this area as it is a hot topic of online debate-I encourage anyone who cares to explore this further to have a look at the different facets of the Comscore website:   http://www.comscore.com/about/

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