After Comscore even surprised the Wall Street with the report that the paid click rates for Google AdSense were down about 7% from December and down about 12% from January last year. Certainly, it resulted from Google's efforts to reduce click fraud and other accidental clicks. However, Google has come out with an explanation that, the decline was intentional and was caused due to some quality initiatives that the company has taken, said Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of North American advertising and commerce, reports Search Engine Journal.

Tim was recently speaking at the Bear Stearns Media Conference in Florida and there he said that, the recent decline in paid clicks “was intentional on our part”, and would result in “a long-term benefit for our business.”

However, we think their efforts to reduce accidental clicks have backfired. Their initiatives such as changing the clickable area of the ad, so as to include only the title and URL, have resulted in fewer clicks. But theoretically it should result in a higher number of conversions, as well as increase the advertiser's return on investment, though this has not been the case here.

This certainly has raised storms of discussions on various forums, and publishers on the other hand are definitely worried. And it seems even the stock holders are ridden on the same worry boat along with the dropping Google share. After the initial ComScore report, Google has further seen nearly 15% drop in share prices. Though things don't look so rosy, still let's try and believe indeed that all this was “intentional” and would result in a “long-term benefit.”

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