“Nobody clicks on sponsored links on Google” you say? Don’t be so sure!

After working within marketing agencies for a long time, you’ll no doubt come across many business owners (and even sometimes marketing experts) that simply have no faith in AdWords for one reason or another. In my experience, these people will generally fall under 2 categories:

1) He/she does not click on sponsored links, and therefore has the opinion that no one else must use click the ads either.

AND/OR

2) He/she has attempted to run an AdWords campaign in the past, but has done so with no or very little knowledge or experience and has therefore seen very little success from the channel.

As AdWords specialists, we know that there is huge potential for Google’s sponsored link adverts to build your online business, however knowing that not everyone is easily sold, we’ve decided to share a great article found over at the Wordstream blog (found here – http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/07/17/google-advertising) which shows an infographic outlining some very interesting figures regarding the popularity of sponsored links on Google (see below).

Here are some interesting statistics (for the US market) that the infographic provides:

- For all “High commercial intent” searches on Google, 2/3 people click on a sponsored link rather than an organic listing. This means that for all searches made where the user has made it obvious that they’re looking to buy a product or service, users will click on a paid advert 64.6% of the time. In my opinion, this is most likely due to the fact that Google users have become more educated about what a sponsored link actually is – they know that someone is paying for the traffic and thus likely to be offering a product or service rather than just providing information.

- Organic results account for just 14.8% of the ‘above-the-fold’ pixels. Sponsored links will generally account for the first 3 listings on the left hand side of the Google search results, however the addition of ad extensions (such as Site Links, Product extensions etc.) has meant that these 3 ads are greatly increasing in size on the search page. I’m sure this is no accident by Google either – they’re paid for clicks onto sponsored links so it would make sense that they want users to click on these instead of organic listings.

- On average, the top 3 spots take 41.1% of 1st page clicks. Given that online shoppers tend to want their product/service yesterday, this statistic isn’t too surprising. It basically means that on average, just less than half of all Google users will only go as far as the top 3 listings on Google…. And these 3 spots are usually taken by paid ads.

If you were one of those people that were not completely sold on using paid ads before reading this article, hopefully it’s given you something to think about! Feel free to leave a comment with your thoughts on these figures.

Graphic by Wordstream. © 2012 WordStream