In most cases, advertisers want to be in the top AdWords spot.
It is known that the top spots get the most clicks. If your AdWords ad shows up in position 1, then you will get more ads than an ad that shows in position 5.
So the click-through-rate (CTR) is higher, the higher your ad is positioned.
However, what about your conversion rate? Does that vary too depending upon where your ad shows up? Meaning: once people clicked on your ad, how many actually make a purchase from your website, or opt-in to your mailing list, or take whatever action you want them to take?
Dan Friedman from the Inside AdWords team recently published the results of the Google team experimenting with ad positions and conversion rates. The found that the ad position almost doesn’t influence the conversion rates. Top-spot ads tend to have a 5% better conversion rate than bottom spot ads. Meaning: If your ad has a 1% conversion rate at the top spot of Google, then it will have a 0.95% conversion rate at the bottom spot of Google.
Keep in mind – you WILL receive less clicks, and thus make less cales, because the CTR is lower with lower positions. But your conversion rate stays almost the same.
