Finance CPC Drops
Recent figures released by Efficient Frontier show that the “Total Finance” category’s average cost-per-click (CPC) in the U.S. has dropped nearly 23 percent from August to September.
The CPC for the category was $2.06 in September, compared to $2.66 in August.
Meanwhile, the “Mortgage” category’s CPC increased 7.8 percent, from $2.68 in August to $2.89 in September.
The “Insurance” category saw its CPC increase 4.3 percent, from $12.13 to $12.65.
“Travel” experienced a 4.2 percent decline in its average CPC, which was $0.72 in August and $0.69 in September.
The “Automotive” category’s CPC dropped 5.3 percent, from $0.57 to $0.54.
“Retail” saw its CPC rise 13.6 percent, from $0.44 to $0.50, while “Dating” experienced a 2.3 percent increase, from $0.43 to $0.44.
Efficient Frontier also described the landscape of search advertising in the third quarter of 2008, noting that for every new dollar spent on search advertising during those three months, Google collected $1.14.
The picture was much uglier for Yahoo! and Microsoft. Each lost $0.07 for every dollar spent on search advertising in the third quarter.
Google grabbed 76 percent of spending despite seeing its search advertising growth slow by 1.9 percentage points from the second quarter.
Yahoo! gained 1.8 percentage points and finished with a 19.2 percent share, while Microsoft finished the quarter with a 4.8 percent share.
Sources:
http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3631193
http://efrontier.com/efficient-frontier/news/press/US-SE-PerformanceQ308.html
