ComScore Defends Themselves on Google

It seems that ComScore is coming out to say that 8% drop in paid clicks from Dec. to February by Google was in fact due to clean-up efforts associated with their quality initiatives. They wanted to get rid of the bad listings to order to enhance their good listings. ComScore also debunk the softening economy rationale for the paid click drop.

There is no obvious reason why the economy would negatively impact Google’s
users and not those of Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask and others. Furthermore, we don’t
need a weak economy rationale to explain the recent decline -- since a similar
decline occurred earlier in 2007 when a weak economy wasn’t an issue.

This makes a lot of sense because why would an advertiser only cut online ad budgets at the site that provides the most eyeballs? You would figure they would first cut their ad spending in the smaller marketshare 2nd tier search area and then work upwards as conditions at their company worsened. Looking at this info I think that anyone who was able to get long Google below $460 got a pretty nice entry point.