Recession has hit several sectors including the top PPC spenders like Finance, insurance and travel.

We have been running a PPC campaign in the banking and financial space since over a year now, and this is the first time that we’re seeing a substantial fall in cost per click even when the avg. positions have moved up.

Cost Per Click versus Avg Position - Google Adwords

The average cost per click in the first week of December has been $1.77 for an avg. position of 7.2. Compare this with February 2008, when a cost per click of $1.82 got us a position of 8.6.

There are several other SEM campaigns where we have seen a similar trend allowing us to safely conclude that some semblance of sanity is now returning to the way people have been bidding on their adwords campaigns.

I was going through the adwords blog a few days ago.  It said that the loading time of a landing page will affect the quality score of a site.
Load time is the amount of time taken for a user to see the landing page after clicking on an ad.

The reasons stated for doing this are:

1.    Users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business.

2.    Users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.
Google says that this change should be made in the next couple of weeks. Load Time evaluations will be added to the Keyword Analysis Page after which there will be a one month notice period to review your site and make necessary adjustments.

After the notice period, the minimum bids for the sites will be adjusted. ie. Keywords with landing pages that load very slowly may get lower Quality Scores (and thus higher minimum bids). Conversely, keywords with landing pages that load very quickly may get higher Quality Scores and lower minimum bids.