What is overall percentage

of searchers who click on paid listings?

[webwoman]

If a company has excellent natural listings for all their desired keywords in a given engine, is there any value to adding a paid listing at that engine?

Does anyone know the statistics on what percentage of web searchers click paid listings as opposed to natural listings?

Thanks,

webwoman

[ShantiShunn]

I've heard different statistics from different people, but the ones that seems most likely is this:

1) Most internet savvy people will click on the natural listings more because the understand what sponsored listings are.

2) People (savvy or not) will use the natural listings more during the purchase research cycle, then when the time to buy comes, they'll use the sponsored listings expecting to be sent directly to thier desired product so that they can conduct thier purchase quickly and easily.

3) Stats I've come accross from various sources (conferences and the such) say that it is a 60/40 split in favor of the natural listings.

Hope this info helps.

Shanti

[webwoman]

Wow, I thought it was like less than 3% that click on the paid listings. I'm not sure where I heard or saw that, and it was a long time ago, but if 40% of the people viewing a search results page click on the sponsored listings, this seems significant enough to make the investment.

Most of the people I have observed and questioned say they ignore the paid listings at the top of the page. Thanks for your input.

[mike schmitz]

Google claims 20% CTR on the sum of all the advertisements in the right column block.

[mike_ppc]

Only 20%? That means only one from 5 visitors would click on sponsored links?

I'm finding it difficult to believe... Where did you read this information?

[BriGuy20]

I think the percentage breakdowns are highly dependant on the search engine used (which takes into account design and audience). I've heard that the paid click ratio on Google is fairly low (unobtrusive ads), while going progressively higher on Yahoo, AOL, Ask, and MSN. I forget the exact numbers.

[OddDog]

looking at the CTR of ads in adwords or overture/yahoo show very different figures.

the yahoo msn placing of ads gets much higher CTR.

[shorebreak]

Back in early 2004, the distribution was:

Google: ~25% of clicks to paid, 75% to free
Yahoo: 35% to paid, 65% to free
MSN: 50% to paid, 50% to free
ASKJ: 70% to paid, 30% to free