Earlier this week in WebProWorld, Rich made a post concerning research recently released by AtlasDMT. The goal of the study was to provide some metrics on the actual impact and value of paid placement listings by their rank or position. While most would rightly expect that a higher positioned placement would outperform a lower position, the results of the AtlasDMT research yielded some fairly surprising results as to the slope of the drop-off from the number one spots.

According to their results, there is nearly a 40% drop off in the 'click potential' of a paid placement from number first position to second position in Google. The difference between first and second in Overture wasn't quite as pronounced but still significant at about 23%. Once this was pointed out in the WebProWorld forums it was met with no small amount of skepticism. Dave Hawley observed that his own experience told him otherwise citing that he had "often had pages switch between number 1,2 and 3 on page of one of the Google SERPs. The traffic decrease/increase for the top 3 is hardly noticeable." While a distinction must be made that Dave seemed to be referring to 'natural' results as opposed to the paid placements in the AtlasDMT study, 40% is still an awfully big number.

For the purpose of their research, AtlasDMT looked at relative impressions; relative click-through rate and what they termed 'click potential'. The researchers define the 'click potential' as the following: "the product of relative impressions and relative CTR... ‘click potential' shows the expected percentage drop in click volume by rank”. AtlasDMT doesn't cite any specific numbers insofar as the scope of their research set, save to say that it encompassed "hundreds of millions of impressions and click for tens of thousands of keywords across a diverse set of industries and categories". You can see their full report here.

If you can look past the 40% drop-off between first and second positions in the Google placement, and focus on the more general implications for their ‘click potential’ formula it seems to make good sense. Basically, if properly applied, their formulas should be useful in gauging the sweet spot for your paid placement campaigns. You may not always find the best value to be the top spot; alternatively you could find that spending a few extra dollars could translate into a significant number of extra clicks to your site. Do I necessarily believe that you can plug in your numbers and take the results directly to the bank? No, but I do think it could be a useful guideline when/if you plan to try a paid placement campaign.

As far as the 40% drop between first and second in Google, I know full well that there are plenty of you, whose initial reaction to this was just outright disbelief (I know it was for me). Start talking about a 40% change in anything in Google and the collective ears of the entire SEO community are going to go straight up – with good reason. But could there be some other explanation for this number? As was suggested by another WebProWorld member, could the source of the anomaly be the placement on the page – i.e. the sponsored links in the colored bar. As you know, sometimes they’re there, sometimes they’re not. In other words is number 2 sometimes number 1 (when the bar listings are gone)? I’d be extremely interested in any thoughts/comments any of you may have on the 40% phenomenon with number one. We’ll turn the lights down and whistle the X-Files theme as we read them by flashlight.

Compare the AtlasDMT findings with your own experiences and see how they measure up. Check your results with paid placement (maybe even non paid) and be sure to let me know how accurate it was for you.

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Hi Mike

Just to clear that statement of mine up, I was referring to organic listings.

However, I still have much experience with AdWords and postioning 1,2 and 3. I have had Number 1 and 2 many times in the past (these are the colored ones at the very top, not side) and the drop in traffic was more like 20% (roughly). More interestingly though, was the increase in the ROI from going from #1 to #3. This, and some other trial and error factors, now sees me only ever bid the min on both competitive & uncompetitive terms.

I'm now convinced that a high ctr is far more benificial to Google than the one paying for all the clicks. As such, I now make certain I use as many keyword/terms as possible and use words like Buy or state a $ value. This allows me to aim for a low ctr without hitting the 0.5% cut off ratio.

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Understood Dave. I agree with you also. That's actually where I think this research and their formula might be helpful i.e. plotting where the cut off ratio might reasonably be expected.

I tend to think the 40% is some sort of aberration with some logical explaination (I just don't know what it is). What I am curious about, is whether or not their findings hold up in practical application.

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It's still interesting to note that 5:3 ratio isn't that enormous.

For every 5 searchers that search 2 buy (or just stop searching) and 3 conitnue to search.

I wouldn't think that once a person has made a commitment to "buy" from a vendor they would continue to search and forget they purchase (or redefine their search - wish suggests the number could in fact be true).

With a marign of error (and/or market diversity) of 1 in a 5:3 ratio > then 4 continue search and only 1 finds what they wanted.

Clearly Dave in your own anslysis for any single term used you don't get 1,000 clicks/term/day in any of the 3 positions. More realistic is less than 100 or possibly 10 where the difference is 1000 to 600 (a margin of 400)

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Atlas stated toward the end of their release that they were planning on -or in the process of, examining conversion to click through rate. That should be interesting to see also.

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I'm been tweaking fireworks.com for awhile now and in both google and yahoo the top 5 positions don't make that big of a difference.

The difference for us is that we are specific in the field, and people searching for fireworks are going to scroll until they come to us. In Google listing we are currently second under macromedia, and Yahoo we are ranked first. We have paid for inclusion before and saw miniscule difference.
For smaller companies I think it is essential to be listed as high as possible, but the larger the company the less it matters.

Customers who know what they want will find you.

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Hi @all,

I'm new to this forum & will read some articles this weekend, please be patient when I repeat things that are just said before. - but...

...for the given discussion I have some experience. I'd like to agree to Dave, as there [is] a lack of success on "1st/2nd line" positions compared to the upper right position. - I think people are so harassed by brute advertisings, they won't even recognize it as an useful information... looks like s.th done by google itself... and who cares about google navigations

Imho, being more specific in planning a "script" when running a campaign will lead to efficiency. Using the adwords deeper features, e.g. the search terms fine options (changing cpc and siteaddr for each single kw-line) will be the first step. - Then, repeat search terms in your text lines, so they are made bold. - Balance your cpc, avoid blue headlines pos.1,2 - and most important, don't use your all-purpose-Portal page as melting pot, leaving it to the visitor to explore where You match His needs! At least, a personal experience: Don't change too often!! Certain guys would return after some time & go the same way they did weeks ago. - If you're still here in the same look, they will find you... otherwise...

Two years ago I had problems to get over the 1% to stay alive on adwords (& spent $1000$ on Christmas business). - Yesterday, one kw, I had 4 clicks from just 6 imps (!), that was 66,6%. - But two persons called me on that term, and we did the biz. - costs for that? $2$.

Ok, it's getting harder every day, as some fools throw their budget off the google-window now, and disappear after two months. I'd say - stay calm, be smart, ask everybody who calls you, how he came to your site, and think of googl'ing as a process, not a single action...

So, I'm not scared for the 40%... but daily for the 4% that really buy sth... ;-)

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As said, I'm glad to find this valuable site here. - I will read, and just wanted to add my opinion to this thread for now.

I've done extensive, controlled, and much testing regarding this over the last few months. This is something I had to do to prove to others in the company that the very fact of "40% drop-off" CT for 2nd and below rankings.

I do our site and SEO, I also do sales for our software so I talk to our new clients/leads daily. I ALWAYS ask them exactly how they found us... 92% via Google, and we get about 40K new visitors a month.

With all that said, 95% of our new clients CT to our site by using the 5th, 6th, and in many cases the 20+ rankings. Not sure if this is a standard for "software" type searches but its factual.

We have quite a few "top KWs" (and phrases) we target, many of our pages come up ranking 1, 2, 4, 5, and so on... for the same term sometimes. Just depends on the title/description for SERps on any given KW.

What I do is try to get a few good listings/rankings for our various KWs and then let the searcher choose which one. A lot of times, they'll CT to the next page and find one there.

Side note... I'd say for at least 90% of our organic listings EASILY beat out the Adwords that display for the same search as the organic listings... not even a question. That is why I've really slimmed down our Google Adwords, our research shows that the searchers really do not look at them.

Time to go fishing :)

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