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disolitude on 15 February 2013
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dsgrue3 said:
disolitude said:


You can find all kinds of CPC stats out there tracked by different companies...including Kenshoo Inc. There are lots of companies run a sample of 1000 word bidding on search engines and then post the cost it took to buy them. Then they post their findings. They really don't represent the full picture though.

But appart from giving you my Google AdWords and Analytics login, there is not much I can do to show you that average CPC rates for Google. It may be because I am in Canada but CPC for Bing and Google over here is well over a dollar.

Essentially you need a login for this to see how much each word costs - https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__c=1000000000&__u=1000000000&ideaRequestType=KEYWORD_IDEAS

And yeah, according to my math, bing made extra 10 million in search revenue in January compared to December. It's true that Bing is still losing money but they have lowered their losses every quarter for the last 2 years. The Yahoo deal is what's making them lose money. They pay yahoo 90 cents for every dollar their search generates while having to fully power their search with Bing. 

The way search works is that the higher your user reach, the better search data you provide, so this is money well spent for Microsoft as they are doubling their pool of search inventory through Yahoo. They are also growing marketshare faster than Yahoo. Even with Yahoo they will be profitable in a year or so, however without yahoo on their back, they are most likely already profitable today with Bing alone.

Well, all I see is myself posting sources for my data and you posting nothing. I've yet to come across any source that cites an average CPC rate over $1.02. The last source posted that you quoted is a paid survey, so I think it's probably more credible than most.

Market share is what you battle for - a volumetric increase in the market itself isn't gaining anything from the competitors. 

Bing losses are Bing losses alone, they do not include Yahoo losses.


Bing losses include the cost of operation that is occured by operating Yahoo's search engine. Yahoo uses Bing and takes 90% of the search revenue. You think 10% search revenue off 12% total US search traffic isn't generating a loss for Microsoft?

It's next to impossible to find out the exact CPC average so there is no point of researching different surveys and posting links found on the internetz. The best you can do estimate based on financials.

For example, here is a "link" which seems to be what you're looking for - http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/25/microsoft-5/

"Online advertising revenue grew $109 million or 15% to $823 million, reflecting continued growth in search advertising revenue, offset in part by decreased display advertising revenue. [...]"

Looking at Q12013 to Q22013 search revenue is jumped around 120-150 million since we all know display advertising is on a downwards trend. (109 million + the revenue display advertising lost). 

Lets take $130 as the safe bet.

So make CPC average an X and take $130 million and plug it in to your formula, using the number of extra searches Bing performed from Q1 to Q2 and you will get an estimated CPC average.

It's not a perfect formula but it's gonna be way more accurate than some 3rd party survey.