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I cant give you accurate figures, but CTRs of 18% from Premium Listings position 1, would tend to suggest the average surfer does NOT have a real grasp of SERPS.
Shak
However, I personally would always trust an independent product review over and above one by the manufacturer itself and this would apply to any form of medium, not just the net.
The trick is to have both :) , if not, at least 1 to cover your ass.
Shak
a keyword banner/button on a search destination achieves 2>4% becuase the surfer is more aware that it is a paid for advertisement.
In this way if Number 1 is getting 18% , number 2 is getting 15%, then the number of SERPS clickers is a lot lower than expected.
Shak
Group A doesn't know that there's a difference between paid and unpaid.
Group B knows there's a difference.
Those in Group B will make a choice on which to click on depending on their needs.
For example, when I'm searching for Special Foil-Wrapped Blue Widgets and I see 2 top banners and 5 Adwords ads on Google, I'm probably going to click on one of those first - simply because I'm pretty sure that if they're advertising for Special Foil-Wrapped Blue Widgets, they've got what I'm looking for and are going to be somewhat competitive.
Whereas if I click on one of the top unpaid listings, I might find Joe Schmoe's Ode to Special Foil-Wrapped Fuzzy Blue Widgets or his top ten list of things to do with a Special Foil-Wrapped Fuzzy Blue Widget - neither of which do I care about at all!
This pretty much confirms what I see in search term research. When I compare Overture data with Google AdWords Select data, and AdWords Select shows a much higher relative click-thru rate than what I might expect from the Overture results, I find that it's often because the Google results for those terms aren't satisfactory... perhaps with confusion for the same terms in other market areas, or whatever.
The AdWords click-thru rates, of course, are influenced by what advertisers target... not just by what searchers search... but then so is Overture.
There's an iProspect study I'll try to dig up that struck me as having some convoluted logic, but spoke to the issue of consumer trust. It said something to the effect that search engines users distrusted search results when top brands didn't rank highly, because they expected that top brands should rank highly, thereby proving that users believe that search engine rankings carry more credibility than paid advertising. Forgive me if my vaguely remembered paraphrase may be doing the study some injustice. Maybe someone else can find it online.
