First Ad Placement Isn’t Always The Best Position for Conversions
November 19, 2009 by Pablo Palatnik
When talking to clients who want to start Pay-Per-Click or want to start managing it themselves, they may believe being in top position will get them the results they need, thus we all know the higher you are position, the higher the price per click, but that itself may not always be true either as Google does calculate CTR when calculating placement for positions in bid pricing.
I came across a very interesting thread in the WebMasterWorld forums regarding ad placement for PPC. Granted, this is a very old thread, 2/3 years now, 2007. But nevertheless, It still holds true as I am seeing it myself and thought it’d be a good post.
“So… we raised our bids in a couple of campaigns we run, in order to get to position 1 or 2 in Adwords (without changing anything else).
After 4 days of testing we found out that:
- More impressions
- More clicks (~30%)
- Much higher CPC (~100%)! So much higher overall costs.
- Much lower conversions! low quality visitors!
So why is that? Our theory is:
- The ads on the top 2 positions, especially if above organic results on the left, are clicked on much easier, and they attract many more ‘casual’ visitors.
- If a customer is really looking for the product you sell he/she will go pass the first 2 ads. If he/she checks out position 3 to 7, for example, he/she is really seriously looking into buy something.
- I have the theory that *potential buyers* NEVER click ONLY on the top ad. They will check at least 3-4, and they more they check the more time they are investing in the search, so potentially these are the best customers.
Honestly I did not expect these results… we will continue testing for another week or so to be sure…
But if the above is true, the whole
The argument of some is that it depends on your niche, product, and other factors but the fact of the matter is that, in my opinion, there are a few variables that will determine the success of your campaign more so than at what ad position your landing page will convert best. It does hold true however that if your margins are very high, you’d have much more success bidding lower and being in lower ad position and that traffic convert at a certain conversion rate.
“I’ve done really well for some clients bidding for the #3 to #5 position. I’m of the opinion that anyone who’s really looking for something (and that’s pretty much who we want) will eyeball the entire list of ads by now. In the three niches where I’ve tried it heavily, we got about the same or slightly more conversions, but our CPCs went WAY down, which meant we were spending the same but getting a lot more clicks and conversions. Everybody won. ”
