Search Clinic Blog news stories about online marketing

The hotly anticipated Q1 Google earning results was released this week and it highlighted the search giant was also feeling the economic pinch.

Google has reported record revenue and profit growth since inception many years ago. On this basis, industry analysts were keen to see whether Google could weather the economic storm that has already battered several other high profile companies’ earnings.

Google Q1 2009 Earning reports. Below is a copy of the slide presentation of their earnings report. 2009 Q1 Google Earnings Slides

As you can see, the company has experience the first drop in revenue since it launched back in 1998. It earned US$5.52 billion in Q1 2009, which represents a 3% decline from Q4 2008, but a 6% increase on Q1 2008.

While revenue dropped, Google posted a net profit of US$1.42 billion, a growth of 9% in Q1 2009. The profit growth was due in a large part to prudent cost management. This was evident in the termination of several unsuccessful services over the past few months.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt prefaced the earnings report with the following statement:

Google had a good quarter given the depth of the recession–while revenues were down quarter over quarter, they grew 6% year over year, thanks to continued strong query growth. These results underline both the resilience of our business model and the ongoing potential of the web as users and advertisers shift online,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. “Going forward, our priority remains investing for the long term to drive future growth in our core and emerging businesses.

While this presents a small bump in road for Google, they are positioned well to ride out the storm. Continued cost management and continued investment in long term strategic search and advertising improvement will see them come out the other side of this crisis as one of the few corporate success stories.

Dr Search is not surprised that Google's profits are still increasing. So profitable is Google that for every £100 which you donate to Google's Pay Per Click AdWords campaigns £85 goes towards buying the bubbly at the shareholders' AGM.

Ask brings back Jeeves for good in the UK

After partially coming out of retirement last year, Ask have decided to fully reinstate Jeeves as their search brand in the UK. Visiting the URL uk.ask.com should take you to the new Jeeves character which has been completely redesigned from the old 2D character.

Jeeves also gives an explanation of why he has returned:

I popped out three years ago to travel the world in a quest for knowledge and I’ve returned to Blighty armed with answers. During my sojourn research showed the public wanted me back, which I found jolly touching.

According to Cesar Mascaraque, managing director of Ask Jeeves Europe, Ask polled their UK users and saw that Jeeves still had a brand awareness of 83%, even after retiring over three years ago.

When you compare this to the 72% awareness of Ask.com, bringing Jeeves back for the team was a smart move.

Ask will return to its original name “Ask Jeeves” with a multi million dollar advertising campaign across the UK. Jeeves will also be given his own facebook fan page and twitter account to help drive the message that he is back for good.

Search Clinic points out that the Ask marketing initiative which it took some years ago to raise the awareness of Jeeves obviously has an enduring return on investment value.