To analyse the huge difference in traffic between the first position in a pay-per-click campaign and the tenth position in the same campaign, latest report by Atlas Institute throws some light on how rankings can impact traffic numbers. Industry’s two most popular PPC engines Google Adwords and Yahoo’s overture were examined to find the relative drop in traffic that takes place with each positional drop in rank. The differences in traffic have been extensively recognized by paid search marketers. Most of the times in order to guarantee control in drawing traffic advertisers are willing to pay whatever it takes to sustain the top spot in the rankings. Specially for these advertisers the report provides ample data to support their belief in the difference in traffic so that it will help them gain number one ranking. For instance the study showed that there was decrease by 40% in traffic between the first and second paid positions in Google’s AdSense program. The traffic drops more gradually beyond position two, losing about 5-10% of traffic per position drop on down to position number 10.

Similar results were found on Overture however the difference between positions wasn’t nearly as vivid as those in the AdWords campaign. Overture listings saw an average drop by 23% from the first listing to the second listing followed by a second drop of around 20% from the second listing to the third. It is sensible to observe that the lower half of the rankings experience much stronger click through potential on AdWords as compared to Overture.