Google's mobilegeddon moves hitting marketers, sites

The differential between what Google's advertisers pay for search ads and what they get has swelled to levels that may be unsustainable courtesy of the company's move to tweak results to favor more mobile-friendly Web sites, according to Adobe data. Adobe's second quarter Digital Advertising & Social Intelligence Report, which is based on anonymous and aggregated Adobe Marketing Cloud data, shows ad rate increases from "mobilegeddon," the move to prioritize mobile-friendly sites, as well as evidence that the search giant's ad cash cow is slowing. For marketers, there's a 25 percent gap between what they pay for clicks vs. what they get. "Parity or click through rates are growing faster than cost per clicks," said Gaffney. "We're not even close right now. To see the gap widening is troubling." Advertisers, however, did pay more for mobile Google search ads as cost per click went up 16 percent from a year ago. Click through traffic was down 9 percent from a year ago.