Google Still Hasn’t Found a Way to Master Mobile

The numbers: Good. The search giant reported net income for the first quarter of $3.35 billion, up 16% from the prior year. Sales, excluding the costs of payments to partner sites for traffic, amounted to $11.01 billion, up about 35% from the same period last year but a bit shy of the $11.15 billion analysts expected, according to FactSet.

The takeaway: Google still hasn’t mastered mobile. But then again, nobody has. Cost per click—a metric that actually measures the price advertisers pay Google each time their ads are clicked on—decreased roughly 4% versus the first quarter of 2012. That reflects the lower rates that advertisers pay for mobile ads. That followed a 6% year-on-year decline in cost per click that Google reported last quarter. Meanwhile, more and more of Google’s traffic is going mobile.

Read more at Quartz.