Hey bouncybunny:)

Not certain about the research, but from what i have read here on webmasterworld, if you want users to Click on your ad, it should get the -> Attention of the user. As far as attention, it should appeal to them. A well made ad will get them to click on it and go to your site. Most users Will Read the Ad and if you created it well enough, they will go to your site instead of the other competitors sites.

So fashion your ads to Stand Out from the rest and you should get more clicks than the rest. Also from what i've read, most Users Will just Scan the results pages, so like i said before: "Stand Out" from the rest. Good Luck!

frenzy77

Hi

I wasn't actually talking about ads, but thanks for the comment. I was talking about SE search results.

Speaking personally, I don't select the search result by its position, but by the text that accompanies it in the search results.

Matt

According to the data "accidentally" released by AOL a few months ago, position #1 is far and away the best. This was based on a massive amount of data, so large a set that at the time there were posts by people who were buying new hardware setups to try to crunch the numbers.

There were a bunch of posts on this at the time, but basically:

46.38% of searchers did not click on ANY result.
48.16% clicked on some result on the first page.
The remaining 5.46% clicked a link on page 2 or higher.

The 1st page clicks were split up as follows:
22.73%...1st position
6.40%....2
4.53%....3
3.24%....4
2.61%....5
2.14%....6
1.81%....7
1.60%....8
1.51%....9
1.59%....10

Interesting that 10th is better than 9th, but not too surprising.

Interesting. Thanks climb512.

I suppose it begs the question as to what degree visitors who habitually click on the top result are actually 'useful' or 'targetted'.

Hey bouncybunny:)

When i mentioned "Ads", i am Refering to the "Search Results". I just called them "Ads" because essentially that's what they are.
Except these Results are Free.(Organic results) And as i said, if you Call attention to them, You will get some good Results.

*Also, that goes the same with Ads. But as a Note, from what i've read, the 2nd position is better than the first. And that Position is usually one that should be strived for since the First is more expensive and the Visability for the Second Spot is just as Good(and less expensive) than the 1st spot. Just thought i'd mention that for All you Ad fans;)

Hope that clarifies things:)

frenzy77

As far as the AOL data goes, does the breakdown of which positions get more clicks apply only to searches through AOL's interface? Because if it's only tracking searches through the AOL interface, then it's hard to tell if the graphical layout of the AOL searches is what is reflected in the data, or searchers' generalized behavior. O the other hand, if the AOL data was tracking searches through other interfaces (I wasn't able to quickly find this out via Google), then the data is much more useful. Anybody have any idea which interfaces this data is actually tracking?