Traffic -Serps (high adwords competition)

[phans]

Does anybody have statistics about the traffic you get for rank 1,2,3 etc for keywords with high competition?
I know that most people say that the 1st place gets between 40-50% of the traffic but with a lot of adwords ads this number has to decrease!

so what can you expect in this situation? 30-40%?

[mkhaddock]

I see stats that say page one, in positions one thru 5 get almost 90% of the traffic and by the time you get to page two you are seeing very little traffic if any at all

[dburk]

Hi phans,

According to the AOL leaked data, the largest dataset ever to be made public, The top organic listing gets about 23% CTR. When someone say 40%, they usually mean 40% of the clicks, not 40% of the search traffic. That is an average and there are many situations that vary a great deal from the average.

For example, in high competition keywords with high commercial intent the CTR for organic listings are often much lower. The top organic listing might get lower than 10% CTR. The point is that it will vary a great deal from one keyword to the next.

The only way to learn what CTR you can expect for a particular keyword is by testing it. Before you invest heavily in an SEO campaign you may want to run a short PPC campaign to test the keyword and ad text to see what works and what kind of traffic and conversions are possible. You may decide that there isn't enough money to merit the SEO campaign needed to achieve top rankings, or that the page title and description you were planning aren't as effective as you had hoped.

[n_touch]

The only problem with running a ppc add to test it, is that many people ignore the ads when searching anyway. Google themselves at one time said that less than 25% of those that use their search engines click on their ads. People go to the organic listings and start from there.

With that said, in the first position you should estimate that you are going to get approx 35-40% of the clicks. This does vary based on your title, and your description. That is why it is vital that you write them in such a way that you entice people to click on your listing.