It’s easy to understand how Google makes billions of dollars every year. In the world of pay per click marketing, it’s all about getting the click. Now think about how many times people are searching on Google every day. To the average person it’s no big deal to click on the yellow highlighted links or the ads on the right side of the page. As marketers, we know better. We might even feel a little sympathetic towards these ads, as we know they are costing the advertiser dearly for each and every click!
The infographic below, created by WordStream, goes into some great detail on the “The War on Free Clicks”, which is really all about how pay per click ads are taking over Google’s search engine results, and why that might actually be a good thing for advertisers.
If Google ever wanted to drastically increase or decrease the amount of money they need to make, all they need to do is remove or add more/less paid ad spots on their search results. Before taking a look at the infographic, let’s first take a look at what a simple search on Google.com looks like for “pay per click“.
With “pay per click” being an extremely sought after search term, you can bet these companies are paying a high amount per click. Fortunately for Google, more than 50% of the listings on the main page of the search results are actually ads. Everything that you see in yellow, if someone clicks on those links, Google gets paid.
Getting back to the infographic, let’s take a look at a few interesting stats, then you can go on to enjoy the full infographic at length.
- Sponsored results account for 64.6% of all clicks, the other 35.4% are from organic listings.
- On average, the top three spots on the search results get 41.1% of the clicks on the page.
- On average, the top organic listing on a search page will only get 8.9% of the clicks.
Very interesting stats… and that’s just a small fraction of what the infographic below has to offer.
