Mobile ad pricing is "one of the many factors at work" affecting click prices, said Nikesh Arora, Google's chief business officer.
"The reality is when your click prices are going down, it means that advertisers are paying less for your inventory," said Colin W. Gillis, a technology analyst at BGC Financial.
Also, the decline in click prices was not just because of mobile ads, said Patrick Pichette, Google's chief financial officer, but also because of other factors including currency headwinds, the balance between developed and emerging markets, the number of ads shown on Google sites versus other sites in its network and changes in types of ads.
It was still down on a year-over-year basis, but for Google, which has reported rising ad clicks and falling click prices for some time, the change was notable.
"Expenses are likely to continue to rise as Google acquires companies with limited revenue, the company may not benefit from the favorable tax rate that drove September quarter earnings, and the acceleration of the core business may stall as increased clicks are offset by a continuation of lower click prices," Gillis said.
Growing technology companies like Google made it possible for one-click price comparisons, explains Alex Muller, CEO and cofounder of GPShopper.
Online shoppers' behaviors, such as clicks, price comparisons, and search records, all those can be captured by the Web.
For example, Essaid said that when Distil works with an e-commerce company, it tackles click fraud (which would mean the company is paying for useless ad clicks), price scraping, and more: "What we try to do is bring everybody to the table.
Advertisers pay based on how often a user click on their ads, and a spokeswoman said the rates were similar to the cost-per-click prices in Google's AdSense network.
By 1997 the two camps were stumping for the new value gospel, based on price-per-eyeball, price-per-click, price-per-lifetime-customer-revenue, and EBE (earnings before expenses).
Launched in 2005, Mpire first developed WidgetBucks, an application that helps Web publishers compare cost-per-click prices among advertisers to find the most lucrative ad deals.
