Google's paid click activity is down 7% from December and 12% from the last quarter as a whole - which has shocked the stock market and sent shares tumbling.

The paid click traffic has hit a wall and the economy is being blamed. I for one have noticed a decline in clicks and the value of clicks in my Adsense account.

It also stands to reason that if paid clicks are down so are organic clicks and I see this with my own sites where well ranked sites do not receive the clicks they once did.

Does anyone else see this?

Google maybe down because of the market and because of the Microsoft bid on Yahoo.

A friend blogs about this: A new study from IDC indicates that on average people spend 32.7 hours online a week and only 16.4 hours watching television. Newspapers and magazines get only 3.9 hours of our attention. IDC surveyed 992 Americans aged 15 years and older.

The 16% that said no I don’t use search engines would have said yes had the question said “Google” or “Yahoo.” (I’m not entirely joking—I was explaining what I do for my grandfather once. I asked him if he used search engines. He said he didn’t. I asked him if he used Google. He said he did.)

My clicks are up but my rankings are improving so that may be the reason.

My take on the article was not a decline in the number of clicks but a decline in the number of people paying for clicks. Around here there are a lot of people who no longer use pay per click and the competition/price for top spots is way down.

I guess being a web master is not as hard as adwords hoped. In my business I see more and more SEO and less and less pay per click.

[quote=PaulNHS] I asked him if he used search engines. He said he didn’t. I asked him if he used Google. He said he did.)[/quote]

Had to comment Paul - this has everything to do with traditional branding as the US knows it. They may very well have caught the "search engine" term early enough after Yahoo smashed it to become the creater and therefore owner. Even though yahoo came out first, google has had bigger guns and louder bangs.

My Mother (62) said the same thing. She's a choir teacher in high school and says a student showed it to here one time and said this is the Internet. She believed and thinks that's all there is to do is go search for CDs and music on google.

I'm seeing roughly the same number of clicks on most of my sites, but the revs are definitely down.

On other sites the CTR is lower, but I can attribute that to a lower bounce rate and reader loyalty. Sort of the price you pay for having people return--they already know where your ads are. :P

Hmm.. No I haven't noticed this.. but I am constantly working on driving traffic to my sites, so the traffic generally goes up. If I notice traffic/clicks/conversion rate.. whatever.. slipping, then I usually jump in until I bring the stats back up.

I mean paid traffic is good as long as it's converting, but there are some factors that you really don't have control of specially if you are just a webmaster and not the distributor of the product that you are selling. You can get them all the traffic but if the customer does not like or does not want your product then whats the use.