Top Ad in Google Adwords

[nyc-seo]

Hello.

How much of a difference does it make in click-throughs to be the first listing in Google Adwords versus the second or third (still at the top of the page)?

Thank you!

[EGOL]

It depends.

If you are an MSRP seller and two deep discounters are above you then you will probably be wasting your money.   If you are a light discounter with two MSRP sellers above you then you will likely get a lot of sales.

So, it depends who you are, who else is in the SERPs and who is lookin for something.

[nyc-seo]

That makes sense. Thank you!

[john4math]

I work on Adwords for an educational subscription-based site, and for us, being #1 is really hard for a lot of searches if there's no purchase intent in the query.  Lots of people seem to do a search and click on the top result, even if it's an ad.

So yes, you can get a lot more clickthroughs as the #1 ad, but at the same time, your conversion rate can suffer.

[NakulGoyal]

I would run a test. A/B test both the situations. See what the difference it. This varies so much by who you are up against, today and your competition could change on a day to day basis. So run this test every few days/weeks.

Run a small campaign to bid for position #1 for x amount of time.

Another campaign to bid for position 2-3 for the same x amount of time.

The cost vs conversions, ROI calculation will tell you what's better for you. If the numbers make sense to stay at #1 and you can afford to do that, why not ?

[john4math]

This is a great point.  You could even implement this simultaneously by adjusting the bid with an Adwords Experiment and not risk any weirdness in the results by running one after the other.

[nyc-seo]

Yes, I can see the risk of more unwanted click-throughs in the top spot. Thank you, John!

[nyc-seo]

Thank you, Nakul. Great advice!