jeffgroovy - 10:12 am on Aug 24, 2007 (gmt 0)

I am sure that AWA has said in the past that the average click through rate for Google ads hovers just over 2%, so with 10 or 11 ads on a page the CTR on Google ads would be 20% or 22% on average.

The 16% figure represents the occasions you mention of 10 or 11 ads at an average CTR of 2% each plus the a great deal of serps only have a 2 or 3 ads. Different queries yield different quantities and quality of ads therefore some queries may only on average get 3% CTR across all advertisers while others may yield 35%, lots of variables in this equation.

One thing worth mentioning is the that this study was done using dogpile where although sponsored links are very informally labeled (the sponsored link appears on the address line in the same color as the URL) and are not clearly separated from the organic listings. I would tend to believe this would cause the CTR to be higher but apparently that article begs to differ. Yet it's worth noting that the meta search engine dogpile.com was used for the study, and they continue to keep the organic and paid ads blended (I say they get a higher CTR than the Google paid ads separated style serps.) Google is much to large to get away with that blending paid ads into organic listings crap, everyone throws a fit when a large search engine even thinks about doing that.

On that thought we are moving into a phase of advertising where people are willing to turn their tv on and watch collections of funny paid ads as the actual show with breaks in between that contain more paid ads. Can you imagine if for one day google eliminated organic serps and replaced them with only sponsored links? They'd make a fortune, but search volume would immediately and dramatically begin to decline. There's not nearly enough paid ads covering the very broad spectrum of search queries to pull that off, nor do the actual quality of the sites appearing in the organic listings and paid listings compare well enough at this point. It takes years of careful site building to get good organic serps, but I'll usurp your organic listing in ranking in 10 minutes of adwords ad setup time....It just costs exponentially more as of yesterday now that google will take your maximum CPC and eat it for breakfast See this thread for more info on that [webmasterworld.com]