So Google’s Q1 results came out over a month ago, so this post is quite late. Nevertheless, here the usual UK analysis. I’ve tweaked the chart to give the USD change too.

Quarter	USD (millions)	GBP (millions)	FX
Q1 07	578	296	0.5117
Q2 07	600	302	0.5037
Q3 07	661	327	0.4948
Q4 07	692	338	0.4891
Q1 08	803	406	0.5056
Q2 08	774	393	0.5071
Q3 08	776	410	0.5282
Q4 08	685	437	0.6373
Q1 09	733	510	0.6959
Q2 09	715	463	0.6474
Q3 09	765	466	0.6093
Q4 09	772	473	0.6127
Q1 10	842	540	0.6411

FX rates are taken from oanda.com.

Here’s the chart of the data table:

Here’s the year-on-year percentage growth:

And finally the quarter-on-quarter percentage growth:

There we have it. Google UK’s biggest quarter, no matter which currency you look at, not something that could have been said last year.

Google results came out yesterday, so here’s my usual look at the sterling version of the numbers.

Quarter	USD (millions)	GBP (millions)	FX
Q1 07	578	296	0.5117
Q2 07	600	302	0.5037
Q3 07	661	327	0.4948
Q4 07	692	338	0.4891
Q1 08	803	406	0.5056
Q2 08	774	393	0.5071
Q3 08	776	410	0.5282
Q4 08	685	437	0.6373
Q1 09	733	510	0.6959
Q2 09	715	463	0.6474
Q3 09	765	466	0.6093
Q4 09	772	473	0.6127

FX rates are taken from oanda.com as usual.

Here’s the chart of the data table:

Here’s the year-on-year percentage growth:

And finally the quarter-on-quarter percentage growth:

Perhaps the only concern is that QoQ, Q4 is only 1% up on Q3. You would hope it would be higher given all the additional retail activity during that time. But it’s a decent quarter all-in-all, up 8% YoY in GBP and 13% YoY in USD. Let’s hope there’s more of that to come in 2010.

This is an update on a previous post, looking at Google’s UK revenues in GBP. Google breaks out its UK revenues due to SEC regulations, but in dollars. This makes it difficult to determine how successful they’ve been in the UK because of currency fluctuations. I make the conversions back to sterling, so here’s the latest based on yesterday’s Q3 results.

Quarter	USD (millions)	GBP (millions)	FX
Q1 07	578	296	0.5117
Q2 07	600	302	0.5037
Q3 07	661	327	0.4948
Q4 07	692	338	0.4891
Q1 08	803	406	0.5056
Q2 08	774	393	0.5071
Q3 08	776	410	0.5282
Q4 08	685	437	0.6373
Q1 09	733	510	0.6959
Q2 09	715	463	0.6474
Q3 09	765	466	0.6093

FX rates are taken from oanda.com as usual.

Here’s the data in chart form:

The quarter-over-quarter change:

And the year-over-year change:

Not a bad result at 14% up year-on-year. Looks positive for the economy, and pretty much what I expected after reading Efficient Frontier’s UK Q3 report.

Google’s Q2 2009 results came out last week, with the usual parade of pre-forecasting and post-analysis. I thought it would be useful to breakout the UK component of their revenues. Being a US company, Google report in US dollars, so I’ve made a rough estimate of what those revenues are in sterling.

Quarter	USD (millions)	GBP (millions)	FX
Q1 07	578	296	0.5117
Q2 07	600	302	0.5037
Q3 07	661	327	0.4948
Q4 07	692	338	0.4891
Q1 08	803	406	0.5056
Q2 08	774	393	0.5071
Q3 08	776	410	0.5282
Q4 08	685	437	0.6373
Q1 09	733	510	0.6959
Q2 09	715	463	0.6474

I’ve taken the FX rates from quarterly mid-market averages supplied by oanda.com. And for the more visually minded, here’s that data in a chart:

The data suggests that the UK business has started to mature since the start of 2008. We can clearly see the seasonal trends (high Q1, Q4; lower Q2, Q3) that one would expect as overall growth diminishes. Although we have only 2 quarters of data for this year so far, this seasonality seems to be more marked.

I’m sure, like me, you can’t resist a couple more charts. So here they are. The first one looks at quarter-over-quarter change:

The second looks at year-on-year change:

So with double-digit YoY growth in a recession, perhaps Google doesn’t have too much to worry about in the UK.

Google released their Q4 2008 results last night and on the face of it it didn’t look good for the UK business. Q4 revenues were down to $685m from $772m in Q3, and even down slightly from Q4 2007′s number of $692m. Of course what’s really done for Google UK is not the economy (so far), but the collapse of sterling.

A back of the envelope calculation in sterling terms actually shows an impressive increase in both quarter on quarter and year on year growth:

• Q4 2007 – £338m
• Q3 2008 – £408m
• Q4 2008 – £437m

So the most recent quarter was up 29% Y/Y and 7% Q/Q in GBP terms, which isn’t so bad. Of course, this is little comfort to Google, an American company that reports in dollars. So Google hedged against currency movements in Q4 and managed to record a $129m income because of it. Clever sods.

To make the calculations, I took average quarterly mid-market interbank rates from Oanda.com. Someone who knows more about forex and finance than me could probably come up with a better analysis, but I think the above is a good rule of thumb.

Her Royal Maj is visiting Google's London office today, along with everyone's favourite off-the-cuff speaker, Prince Philip. Here's Google UK's logo to mark the occasion:

A bit dull, so I created my own:

Much better!

Updated on 8th June 2008

So Google is about to get into the financial comparison market.  Look what I saw when I just did a search for secured loans:

A customised ad slot promoting Google Merchant Search Beta, with a helpful dropdown of loan amounts.  Clicking through the ad leads to this comparison of different loans providers:

Holy moly.  Is Google trying to beat some of their biggest advertisers at their own game?  This is a big leap into the CPA business.  As the FAQ page says:

Participating providers pay Google when someone requests a quote through this system.

Why Secured Loans?
Secured loans are the easiest financial products to compare side-by-side. Companies can simply tell Google their interest rates for different loans amounts and that's more or less it.  Compared to more complex products such as insurance or mortgages it's a walk in the park.  The requirements for going beyond secured loans should not be underestimated.  As Doug Scott points out, managing dozens of feeds that change in realtime can lead to massive technical headaches.

Google also has another problem enticing traditional, high street lenders into competing in the AdWords auction.  Looking up at that SERPs screenshot, you can see only see comparators and bad credit specialists.  That's because those advertisers have bigger margins and can afford to bid higher.  High street brands just can't afford to appear at those high CPCs.  Therefore Google is looking for another mechanism to get at their marketing budgets.

Is Google Abusing Its Position?
Perhaps. Google is promoting Merchant Search Beta with an ad that has a title of 49 characters, almost double what it allows other advertisers. Not to mention the dropdown, again a feature unavailable to anyone else.

Google usually pushes new features through universal search. Patrick Altoft has a mock-up of how that might look if Merchant Search appeared there.

Ultimately Google has got to decide whether the revenue it earns through the Merchant Search can surpass the revenue it would make selling that top spot to an advertiser.  It might take sometime for Google to make that decision, so expect more experiments like this in the future.

I just did a vanity search on Google (come on, we all do it) and I've been one-boxed.  I used to live near Beeston when I was at university in Nottingham. Ordering a taxi over the phone when your name is Beeston and you want to go to Beeston is one of the most confusing things ever.