The position of pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements on a web page does little to affect conversion rates.
This is according to chief economist at Google Hal Varian, who said in a blog post that there is "very little variation" in terms of conversion rates for ads on websites. He explained that an ad that gained a one per cent conversion rate in the best position on a web page would see that figure fall by only 0.05 per cent on average if it was relocated to to the worst location.
"For example, for pages where 11 ads are shown the conversion rate varies by less than 5 per cent across positions," he remarked. Mr Varian also noted that ads located above the search results on Google have a conversion rate that is within two per cent of that achieved by PPC adverts placed on the right-hand side of the page.
In related news, recent research by digital communications agency Organic revealed that the return on investment potential for Bing, Microsoft's new search engine designed to compete with Google, is greater than that offered by its predecessor, Live Search.
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