This is an interesting one for pay-per-click users: which is the most clicked position and why. Now, while the answer may be obvious to some of you, bear with me because it’s not always so. Read on to find out why.

All right so the main thought that springs to mind when I tell you which position is most-clicked for AdWords is that it’s the one above the actual results, and partially you’re right. But that position is not without its problems. First of all, people tend to skip right past that highlighted area, and that’s for two reasons: the first is that that result does not look like a result (it only has a short title and first below it is not the description but the link, which tends to throw people off); the second is similar to the first, in that when scanning through the page that green area with little information does not register so quickly.

So what does this mean to an advertiser? Well, for one we have a problem, because you pay a lot and you get less optimal results (which I think is pretty unfair of Google). But let’s look past the issue here, how can you actually use that spot to get a high conversion rate? Two things: target commercial searches (”technics RF290 buy online”) rather than generic or research searches (”headphones” or even “technics headphones” in some cases), and second is match the searcher’s query. This is crucial if you want to actually make use of that top position ad. Again, there are two reasons for this as well and they are as follows. First is that as I said before people tend to scan the page when they make a search, which is why you need to anticipate and fulfill his expectations, meaning that you need to think like a searcher and give him the lines he’s looking for. Do keyword research, optimize campaigns so that ad text matches searches, use strict match for keywords (which is generally a good idea) and most of all do user testing. Start with web histories to which you have access (if you have a Google account you’re bound to have your own searches saved) and look through them at what you searched for and what you clicked. As for the second reason for doing this, it’s because you are not alone up there, there are up to three competitors with you which all target the same things.

But enough about that top space, what about the rest? Well, I for one tend to click on ads when my intentions are commercial, unless I either have an established merchant from which I frequently purchase, or I find one that seems promising within the first page of that Google search. But if an ad up there matches my expectations I will click on it. What that means is if I’m looking for a merchant who ships for example laptop skins (i’m looking and i’m looking but in my country such a thing is rare) I’m going to click on that ad saying “laptop skins - design your own and get free shipping” or something along those lines. And a strange thing I am beginning to see more and more recently is that normal results are written better than ads, which is problematic to say the least… Why would you spend money on an ad without making it better than a normal result. It’s like buying a billboard in the center of the city and writing a lot of small text on it with illegible colours just because you didn’t want to spend money on a designer.

Moving on, I like to do case studies and usually competitor analysis because it teaches you a lot (and opens your mind to different approaches). So I took this query and looked at the ads. All things equal if it were me doing that search I would click the result on the right titled “accommodation in london”. Why? Because it matches my search and my expectation. Anyway, here’s a screenshot before we go any further:

And I took this image and put it through an interesting web service called feng-gui which analyzes layout and it came up with:

And as you can see this is a heatmap which shows us that the first place someone looks at is in fact the top ad from the right and then the first search result itself, after which returning to the ads on the right. This is of course not a bulletproof way of testing such things but it should show us an approximate tendency and my thought is it’s right.

So basically you do want the top position in ads but you will want the top right, and the one on top of the results is only shown in one in three searches anyway (Google tells us there’s a 33% chance) so in a sense it’s wasted money.

One last thing I wanted to ad is never underestimate the value of a good ad, so hire a professional to write it. It will return the investment back to you in the necessary time.

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