Search Keyword Prices Fall, Post-Holidays

article confirming lower CPC

[howiejs]

Emarketer:

"Search Engine Optimization firm Fathom Online reports that search engine keyword prices declined by an average 3% between December 2004 and January 2005 across four major business sectors.
Keywords for the retail industry in particular declined by 11% over the month and keywords in the wireless industry fell by a significant 28% between December and January. Fathom's Online Keyword Price Index covers four major sectors — automotive, consumer, finance and telecommunications — with retail, services and travel/hospitality breakouts in the consumer sector, investing and mortgage breakouts in the financial sector and broadband and wireless breakouts in the telecom sector.

Average prices in January ranged from a high of $4.93 for mortgage-related keywords to lows of $0.52 for retail keywords, $0.88 for travel keywords and $0.79 for wireless keywords."

article:
[emarketer.com...]

[europeforvisitors]

Overall averages may be of interest to the search engines themselves (or to investors), but they don't mean much to the typical publisher.

Even within a sector or a "breakout" within a sector, averages may not mean a lot, especially for topics (such as leisure travel) that have significant variation in seasonal demand.