Creatalytics by Matthew Burgess

“Analysts said they were pleasantly surprised by Google’s results because the company’s own moves recently had indicated it was feeling some pain from the economy.”

This is from Business Week: Behind Google’s Glowing Earnings.

Eric Schmidt’s lead quote in the press release: “Google performed well in the fourth quarter, despite an increasingly difficult economic environment. Search query growth was strong…”

This looks pretty much in line with what I predicted. But as I dive into the details of their press release and earnings call, I can’t find anything more specific in terms of the source of search query growth. I’d be interested to hear if anyone has seen detail on this.

Tidbits of interest to me:

• Paid Clicks increased 18% over Q4 2007, but only 10% over Q3 2008.
• 50% of total revenues are from outside the US. They actually got kind of killed onthe stengthening of the dollar over the last quarter.
• I’d be interested to know if the Paid Clicks growth was equally distributed over US and non-US traffic, or if it came more from international.
• TAC – Traffic Acquisition Costs – this is their fancy name for commissions; the portion of revenues shared with Google’s “partners,” the majority of which is AdSense payouts. This figure was 27% of total advertising revenues. This is a higher overall rev share than I would have expected.
• They wrote off $726 m of their investment in AOL and $355m from Clearwire. Ouch.

Filed under:
Google PPC by Matthew Burgess