Position 11 is 4 times more effective than position 10

[acee]

I've always found that being top of page 2 of search results to be more effective in aquiring visitors than the bottom positions of page 1, but I didn't appreciate to what extent until this morning.

I've seen a 400% increase in clickthrus by dropping from 10 to 11 on Google.

Has any analysis ever been done on the effectiveness of positions in SERPs.

[sublime1]

This correlates with some statistical analysis I did in 1999 when I worked for a search engine company. We tracked clicks on links in our results and found a distribution of clicks for a given query (on a 10 result page) something like (from memory):
1-1:30%
1-2:20%
1-3:10%
1-4:5%
1-5:4%
1-6:4%
1-7:2%
1-8:2%
1-9:3%
1-10:5%
2-1:7%
2-2:5%
2-3:2%
...beyond <1%

We ruled out the actual relevancy of the result by randomizing the ordering of results amongst the first 30 during our test. Conclusions:
1) Being first is far better than second, third, etc. (which we dubbed the "million monkies hypothesis")
2) It's better to be at an edge, so the bottom several results did better than the middle (which we dubbed the "hockey stick effect"
3) This pattern continues for at least the first three pages of results
4) Very top of page N+1 is slightly better than bottom of page N.

This test is has many flaws, of course. The UI of the search page matters (we guessed that people would scroll to the bottom to click the "Next" button and then see a link that looked reasonable). This was also a long time ago and users were less conditioned to search then than now, etc.

Nevertheless, there is some element of human behavior embedded in those numbers.

[cabbie]

Thanks Sublime.Thats handy to know.

[ericli]

I agree. My observation got the same conclusion.