Complete.com just finished a study and came out facts that some people knew all along. In search marketing the first place listing is all that matters. Second place though not as bad still does not deliver the punch when it comes to search marketing.
According to them, and they did analyze tens of millions of search engine results, more than 85% of all listings were organic while paid search listings were a mere 15%.
As for clicks it was observed that 53% that got the honors were first listings. Second listings got 15%, while the third listings got only 9%. This trend continued to the top 5 listings.
It is clear from these results that organic listings occupy the mind-space of the viewers. And needless to say that since they get the most clicks they also get more business. It is therefore imperative that businesses have a strategy to monitor and improve performance on search engine result page rankings to stay in contention.
Having said this paid listings also perform better when on top of the page. According to the study almost 61% of paid listings appeared on the right hand side of the search results and all they managed was 13% of clicks.
So, if you want to use paid listings then make sure you are on the top of the page and not near the right side bar of the page.
Interesting facts about the top paid listings that came out were. The first listing got a stupendous 59% of all the clicks, while the third listing from the top got a mere 9% of the clicks. However they got far more than the first paid listing on the right hand side.
Some other interesting things that were discovered in the study are that the listings on the bottom of the page got a meager 2% of the clicks and these ads are almost 15% of all paid listings on a search engine result page. 24% of all paid listings on the SERP are on the top of the page and they get 85% of the clicks.
These results should serve as an eye opener to advertisers and marketers so that they can make suitable changes to their marketing strategies to get a bigger bang for their buck. After all whether it is SEO or SEM it is Return on Investment that really matters.