I just got word today that Google will be releasing a Pay Per Search service for it’s end users. This service will be available to end users that are not interesting in seeing the ads, powered by Google Adwords. Users will be allowed to purchase credits using Google Checkout, and can opt to pay (estimated at 1c) for each search query that they run through Google.
This is a great idea for users who don’t want to be bombarded with ads, however the problem for PPC marketers, is that if Google starts to see a lot of users opting to pay for searches, our PPC traffic from the campaigns will drop – resulting in far more traffic that will end up through natural search. Yet again, the constant battle between paid and natural search is heating up!
It’s actually been a full year since I announced that Google was looking at reverting to CPM from CPC. The argument was that Google was looking to boost revenues on low Clickthrough Rate search terms – perhaps Pay Per Search is a better way of achieving this? Only time will tell!
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