Google Inc., reported its first quarter financials Thursday and while the search giant continues the grow, it once again missed market expectations.

Google reported revenue of $17.3 billion and earnings per share of $6.57 for Q1, up 12 percent over the same quarter of 2014. The company noted though that without foreign exchange issues (the rising U.S. dollar in particular) the increase would have come in at 17 percent.

The market had expected $17.5 billion in revenue on $6.61 per share earnings.

Advertising revenue came in at $15.51 billion, representing 11 percent year over year growth. However, the figure was down 5 percent versus the last quarter of 2014.

The problem in Google’s core advertising product continues to be with cost per click (CPC) rates, with CPC’s for the quarter dropping 13 percent on Google-owned sites, but increasing slightly by 2 percent on Network Member sites, for an aggregate drop of 7 percent.

Paid clicks though countered the drop in CPC rates delivering an aggregated total increase of 13 percent compared to the same quarter of 2014, however, compared to Q4 2014 paid clicks dropped 1 percent.

Capital expenditures for the quarter came in at $2.92 billion, down from $3.6 billion for Q1 2014, and Google’s cash at hand now sits at a cool $65.436 billion.

Total costs and expenses grew 13 percent to $12.81 billion compared with the same quarter of 2014, and follows from an increase of Q4 2014 of 22 percent. R&D costs were up 29 percent year-on-year, and follows a 46 percent increase in the fourth quarter.

The results overall weren’t disastorous for Google, and it’s still making a large amount of money, however the decline in revenue growth isn’t something that simply occured this quarter, but has been an ongoing trend in Google’s results going back two years.

It is a sign of a maturing company, but likewise despite Google’s various efforts in areas such as mobile, it will either need to shake things up, or acquire a new business if it wants to return to its halycon days of increasing growth rates.

Not surprisingly, particularly given it happened last quarter, Google stock was up 3.16 percent in after hours trading despite missing market expectations.

photo credit: IMG_0001 via photopin (license)