Why AdWords Brand CPCs Are Rising, And What Can You Do About it?

When you’re a webmaster, or the owner of a website, one of the important aspects of paid search benchmark data is the ability to find out if everybody is seeing what you want them to see.  Unfortunately, the official data that search engines give out is usually sparse, and can even be misleading.  Because of that, it isn’t all that helpful.

As an example, when you hear that Google is reporting that its clicks are up 18% year-over-year, while CPCs are down 11%, most other industry reports are showing weak AdWords search click growth and rising average CPC.  Obviously, these two view points are polar opposites of each other.

It’s now known that YouTube “clicks” are having quite the impact on the limited metrics Google publicly discloses, and are probably flipping the narrative on the real story.

There was a post by Mark Ballard where he argued that Google search CPCs were rising quite considerably, which was a result of Google raising the minimum CPCs.  This all has led to the decline of search ad impressions, even if we were to account for Product Listing Ads.

A number of other advertisers have noticed the recent surge in costs per clicks for their brand terms, and everybody would like to know why.  Mark Ballard, in his newest post, explores the issue to what’s going on.

Click on the following link to see what is going with the rising CPCs.

Search Engine Land: AdWords Brand CPCs Rising? Here’s Why And What You Can Do About It