I've used Adwords pretty much since they were introduced by Google. Adwords is the service which Google runs which allows a site owner to pay per click for visitors to their site (where that visitor will then hopefully purchase a product or service). It's basically the polar opposite of Adsense (which we all know about!)…

You've seen Adwords on the Google site - when you seach for something they are listed in small boxes down the right-hand side of the page…the more you pay google the higher your advert will be placed. The ultimate aim is to get your advert above your competitors!

Or is it?
So, having done a fair bit of testing, I came to the conclusion that it's much better to have the 5th or 6th placed advert rather than to pay megabucks to get #1 spot. Why 5th or 6th? That is towards the bottom of that right hand column of adverts. Makes sense? No?

OK, I'll explain a bit more
Let's say you search for "purple widgets" - you'll get about 50,000 search results. We all know that a massive percentage of searchers don't bother going past page 1 of the search results. So, if your site is on page 1, happy days! However, most peoples sites are not on page 1 and here's where my little psychology trick comes in…

The Trick
Having your site in 5th or 6th place means that your advert will be the first advert that the searcher sees. No-one searches Google solely for adverts, they search for results. If there are no results on page 1, they will search again.

But get this; the vast majority of people are so lazy that they will scan down their search page results, then shift across and scan up the adsense ads. No-one scrolls back to the top of the page to read the adwords results. Meaning that the ads near the bottom of page 1 get the best CTR.

I found this out entirely by accident a couple of years ago. I was playing with my Adwords account trying to make sure that I was not overspending. On one particular campaign I was having great success while spending pennies.

On the other campaign I was spending 10 times as much with less desirable results!

If you don't believe what I am saying, try it the next time you search Google => it's totally natural to scan down the search results, then up the adwords adverts.

Another great benefit
Of course, another great benefit of getting a lower placed adwords ad, is that the cost is substantially lower than chasing the top-spot…