LIVE: Google earnings

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Larry Page not bad

AP

Google CEO Larry Page

Google is set to announce its Q1 earnings Thursday afternoon.

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Here's what analysts are expecting:

  • Revenue minus traffic-acquisition costs: $14.03 billion
  • EPS: $6.63

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The other two important data points to pay attention to are the cost per click (how much Google can charge its advertisers every time a user clicks an ad) and the number of paid ad clicks.

CPC has been steadily declining, largely because advertisers don't want to spend as much on mobile ads as they do on desktop ads, while more and more search traffic now comes from mobile.

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Analysts expect cost per click to continue going down, but the number of paid clicks to be up ~15% year-over-year (in Q4, paid clicks were up ~14% year-over-year).

Google has missed its EPS estimates in six of the last eight quarters and its revenue estimates in five of them, but the stock is up ~3.5% this year.

This will be the last quarter where CFO Patrick Pichette will be leading the earnings. Google hired former Morgan Stanley CFO Ruth Porat to take over for Pichette when he retires in May. Wall Street hopes that having Porat in charge will help curb the company's spending and bring better visibility to products like YouTube.