Click through figures based on ad position

Specific to a local search site

[inbound]

I thought some of you would be interested in the relative click through rates for adverts that appear on our local search properties.

This is a small sample of just 10,000 click throughs from earlier this month but the pattern seems to be clear. It should be noted that the pages may have had anything from 1 to 15 adverts on, no adjustment has been made for pages with less than 15 adverts, it's purely how many clicks were made on the relevant positions.

Some of you may recall the research that showed Overture and Google relative click through rates so I have provided this list as relative to click through against position 1:

1 - 100
2 - 52.3
3 - 34.6
4 - 26.1
5 - 16.8
6 - 13.7
7 - 9.7
8 - 6.5
9 - 6.6
10 - 5.4
11 - 3.8
12 - 3.5
13 - 3.8
14 - 2.9
15 - 2.9

And this one that has the percentage of clicks for each position (totalling 100 percent):

1 - 34.7
2 - 18.1
3 - 12
4 - 9
5 - 5.8
6 - 4.7
7 - 3.4
8 - 2.3
9 - 2.3
10 - 1.9
11 - 1.3
12 - 1.2
13 - 1.3
14 - 1
15 - 1

Anyone else care to share their figures?

[earlpearl]

That is a great post and very revealing. I've never taken the time to study this data. I'm fortunate to have a lot of profit margin between click through costs and ultimate profit margin.

But this is killer information.

Anyone else have data like this.

dave

[earlpearl]

I had to rethink this.

What do those numbers represent. Does the 34% for #1 ranked site represent 34% of the sample of 10,000 clicks or does it represent 34% of the impressions for those keywords.

If it was the latter I'd be shocked. Looking at that another way and adding the totals of the #1 and 2 ads it would suggest that more than 50% of all searchers will visit PPC not organic results.

Please clarify a bit.

Dave

[inbound]

The 34.7% is not the click through rate for that position, it's the percentage of clicks out of the 10,000. So 3,470 clicks came from position 1.

You can draw your own conclusions about the actual CTR, I can't give that out.

[earlpearl]

Thanks for the clarification. My second reading of that worried me into thinking all your traffic...and more and more web traffic was responding to ads and not organic listings.

That is awesome data. Again, I'm only sorry I can't add to the information, in that I don't analyse that way. I've been lazy on PPC.

In my case I get a huge ROI on return on clicks. My sale/service are so much higher than costs per click.

My ads tend to run anywhere from 1-6 and frankly I can afford to move them all to the top for my main business site.

BTW, I'll come back w/ a reference to an interesting analysis tool I saw something about. Its oriented toward retailers and seems to do a lot of data crunching relative to click through rates, product, profitability, time of year, etc. to assist retailers with PPC strategies. (But then again I'm not 100% sure just as I wasn't sure about your information) LOL

Dave

D