Google Clickthrough Growth Slowing

Unofficial figures released by comScore last week show that the growth in the number of US web users clicking on Google ads is showing signs of slowing.

Google’s paid clickthroughs were up just 3% year on year, and down 3% compared to January 2008.

According to the comScore data, the February figures mark the second month in a row that the clickthrough rate has fallen, with January figures down 7.5% on December.

In February, Google said that any fall in its clickthrough rate was due to work it had carried out making text ads more useful to users.

Last week it was reported that Google’s introduction of a search within search feature, which lets users stay on Google to find pages on sites such as Wikipedia, had upset some publishers (see New Google Search Feature Could Affect Publishers).

Publishers are said to be upset about the new functionality as they want people to search on their own pages and be exposed to their ads rather than Google’s.

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