[DevKoala]

I am not rejecting the author's analysis, but the industry is moving towards cost per conversion. Even marketers for small time ad agencies have gotten savvy and realized that the click is nothing but a proxy. Also, I never realized Google actually posted CPC numbers, I don't track B2C in depth, but considering the amount of synthetic traffic, CPC numbers can be meaningless.

[busterarm]

Absolutely.

I feel like in the early days of digital advertising everyone was used to broadcast where there's a phenomenal amount of waste (you have to buy commercials at times and on channels when there's no listeners to get pricing down. Also a significant amount of the ad you're buying doesn't actually run and you have to employ people/services to verify your ads ran and get rebates).

The amount of data for digital got an entire generation of marketers savvy on cost optimization from the razor thin budgets for staffing and digital campaigns with a much higher velocity (short 2 weeks campaign vs 3-6 month TV campaigns).

Now just having reach isn't enough. Google got a lot of years of band-aiding the problem with PageRank and marketers still want to do better. Now Google is facing competition for spend by the very companies they partnered with for add-on services.

Instead of "get eyeballs to my site and charge me" it's "improve the interaction with my brand and charge me"

[fogetti]

I think you are conflating the seller and buyer side. In Google's case the CPC is actually a revenue and they do not see it as cost as the marketers you described. So from marketers' POV, yes, conversion makes more sense. From Google's POV they couldn't care less I think.

And the important thing is the trend, not the actually quarterly numbers anyway. Which I assume would be the same even if we took a look at the conversions.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Google absolutely cares about conversions. Customers that don't see conversions will eventually stop doing business. Iirc in the early days of google analytics one of the much touted features was the ability to connect google ad clicks to the conversion funnel.

[Gustomaximus]

Also Google cares about conversions because if they can get people tracking down funnel they can better optimise to get to to pay more for less impressions/clicks, and the now unused space can be sold elsewhere. When done right it's win/win.

[summerlight]

For the target CPA products (which is now the major driver), CPC depends on conversions volume generated by ads. So Google won't make more money even if some changes lead to more clicks but not conversions since the actual bid on clicks will be generally lower on low value clicks.