AOL users more likely to click on Ads than Google users

Twice as likely in my experience

[beren]

This is not the result of an academic study, but based on analysis of traffic to two websites that I manage.

AOL Search uses Google’s engine, and also runs Google AdWords. A search basically brings up the same results at both places, so any differences in traffic from the two services are due mainly to differences in their users’ behavior.

Website 1:

AOL: ratio of paid clicks to total clicks: 62.9%
Google: ratio of paid clicks to total clicks: 25.9%

Website 2:

AOL: ratio of paid clicks to total clicks: 82.5%
Google: ratio of paid clicks to total clicks: 39.6%

Now the two websites are in different industries, and do differently on SERPs and have different bidding strategies, so you can’t compare across websites. But you can compare within a website between AOL and Google, and the differences in percentage of traffic from paid clicks is striking. For AOL it is twice as high.

These numbers were generated from over 6 months worth of traffic, including thousands of paid and unpaid clicks from both AOL and Google, so I think they are statistically significant.

Conclusion: AOL search users are much more likely to click on ads than Google users.

[AdWordsAdvisor]

Very interesting stats, beren. Thanks for posting this.

AWA

[eWhisper]

Slightly more 'official' study which confirms your stats:
[clickz.com...]

[shorebreak]

This could simply be a result of AOL devoting more real estate/inventory to paid vs. organic results, as the ClickZ article seems to suggest.

[martinibuster]

There is a June 2004 study done by Vividence that shows Google and Yahoo neck and neck in terms of CTR.

Ask Jeeves is the clear leader in people avoiding the non-paid results and clicking on the ads instead.

Vividence report is available for download as a PDF here [vividence.com].

[ngentot]

There was a study done by...ehm I forget...that shows Google users are less likely to click on paid ads than users of other search sites.

The reason? Due to their "Do No Evil" policy, Google makes a visually clearer distinction between their paid and natural results on their page. So basically, according to the study, Google trains its users to *ignore" their paid ads.

[robotsdobetter]

Yeah, I think it's true because I am one of them. :)

[PatrickDeese]

I wish I they had included AJ in those studies - what do you suppose the PPC CTR is for their site? 60 - 70%?

[online]

That's an interesting stats! Sponsored links at AOL are supplied by GG AdWords aren't they? Is there a way to control it from adwords account? And...What's the reason for not *all* Ads appearing in search in GG to appear in search in AOL?

Thanks for help..

[ThomasAJ]

And still the 'good guys' (sarcastic note) at Google don't count AOL clicks as part of their CTR when disabling ads. Truly unbelievable!

[Jack_Hughes]

must confess that I go straight through to the ads on google for many of my searches. plainly, for an informational search on google (like some info on an open source tool) I don't look at the ads first (or ever usually) because I expect the info to be in the organic searches. but for the money words i look to the ads first.