Top Search Result Means Less Ad Clicks?

Posted on by Daniel Hinds
Categories: SEO Tips Tagged: ,

If you had to guess, which search result on Google’s first page would give you the most bang for your buck as far as ad clicks go? The conventional wisdom would be to say the higher the result, the better your ad clicks will be, but a new study is showing us that conventional wisdom isn’t always as accurate as you’d like to believe.

Today, we have a new study released by the advertising network Chitika. It shows the ad click-through rates on websites when users come from different positions on the first page of Google’s results. In a pretty shocking twist, the ads on the pages had the best click-through rates when the visitors found the page in position 10 of the results.

Here is the data so you can see for yourself:

CTR

 

As you can see, it’s a pretty linear progression. The lower you are on the first page of Google results, the better your ad click-through rates will be.

“What is clear from the data set is that although the first position of a Google search result drives the most search traffic, an average visitor coming from that link is the least likely to convert into an ad click,” according to Chitika.

Chitika said the reason why Position 10 might be driving the most ad CTR on a site could be due to unsatisfactory results.

“When a user scrolls down and clicks on a link at Position 10, it is more likely that they have not found what they were looking for, increasing the probability of that person clicking on an ad related to their search query,” Chitika said.

What does this mean for you? Cristian Potter, a data solutions engineer at Chitika, says that you should incorporate the data into your larger SEO analytics:

“Hitting the sweet spot requires some analysis of an individual site’s traffic, for example, understanding how users are finding the site, and how certain campaigns have impacted actions undertaken by users on the site itself,” Potter said. He added that this research can serve as a “as a point of reference in plotting metrics and key performance indicators.”

Our two-cents? Shoot for the top position, take position 10 as a consolation prize if you have to.

 

 

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