Google said the number of clicks on adverts during the third quarter grew by 17 per cent over the same period in 2013, although the price of ads – the so-called average cost per click (CPC) – fell by two per cent, a reflection of the greater share of advertising on mobile phones.

The number of advertising clicks was actually a slowdown from the prior period’s growth, although this is tempered by the fact the fall in CPCs was lower than the prior quarter’s six-per-cent drop, a point made by the company’s SVP and CFO Patrick Pichette.

“When we talk about mobile, there are a couple of things. One is you have to continue to look at both the growth in volume and the growth in pricing. So these are long-term trends that we’re seeing. The CPCs and the clicks, they can fluctuate from quarter-to-quarter. It just happens that we’ve made some changes this quarter that improved the mobile pricing while impacting the lower quality clicks and that’s what you see a bit reflected in our numbers.”

However the long term trend to advertising on mobile screens — and away from desktop PCs —does hurt Google’s revenue, a trend exacerbated as more of the search giant’s business comes from emerging markets where search is mostly done on mobile devices.

Google reported consolidated revenues for the quarter ended September 30 of $16.52 billion, a 20 per cent increase over third quarter 2013 revenues of $13.75 billion. However, this performance was below some analysts’ estimates.

GAAP net income (including net loss from discontinued operations) in the third quarter of 2014 was $2.81 billion, compared to $2.97 billion in the third quarter of 2013, representing a fall of 5.4 per cent.

In the future, Google is looking to non-advertising businesses to pick up some of the slack. Their contribution is featured as the “Other” category in the company’s results and lumps together a number of different activities.

The segment delivered an impressive figure of 50 per cent revenue growth in Q3 to $1.84 billion, although it does only account for 11 per cent of Google’s total revenue. The company does not disclose whether it is profitable or not.

Among the activities are Google’s Play store, which sells apps alongside movies, music and games, and the Chromecast dongle that enables the transfer of video from PC to TV.

Google would only point to growth from the Play store and licensing revenue to give a flavour of what’s performing well in this segment.