Should You Always Chase Top Spot in Search Results?

“If you ain’t first, you’re last!”

Some of you may know this quote from Talladega Nights, others may have heard it from a boss/client insisting that appearing at the very top of search results is the paramount goal of their online advertising. While no one would object to placing first in any sort of competition, whether sports or marketing, it’s quite the generalization to say that’s the only result of value.

Is that idea based on real business outcomes, or is it more a matter of ego & optics? Let’s look at a realistic hypothetical to answer this question.

Calculating if Showing Up First in Search Results is Worth It

Say you’re running a search campaign on Google Ads with the goal of driving conversions. If the only metric you looked at was ad position, or how high in the search results your ad showed, which of the following results would you rather have for your search campaign:

A) First position

B) Second position

Without any other context, hooked up to a lie detector, you’d pick option A. In theory, your ad is likely to get more attention in the higher position, so that’s probably the right answer if you had no other factors to consider. But this is online advertising, and we have more data to work with of course, so let’s look closer:

A) First position, 10% CTR, 20% Conv. Rate

B) Second position, 5% CTR, 18% Conv. Rate

Top spot, with better click-through rate AND conversion rate? The no-brainer continues, you’d pick option A.

Hold on though, because we haven’t talked about cost yet. Let’s take it further and include cost-per-click:

A) First position, 10% CTR, 20% Conv. Rate, $5 CPC

B) Second position, 5% CTR, 18% Conv. Rate, $2 CPC

Still choosing A? Let’s apply a $1,000 budget to both, and now that we know the money spent, we can turn KPIs into actions. We divide the budget by the CPC to find the number of clicks, divide the clicks by the CTR to find the number of impressions, and multiply the conversion rate by the clicks to see the number of conversions:

A) 200 clicks on 2,000 impressions resulting in 40 conversions

B) 500 clicks on 10,000 impressions resulting in 90 conversions

On the same budget, option B yields 50 more conversions. That higher number of sales/leads on the same budget is ultimately the outcome you’re looking for, plus the extra awareness and traffic from more impressions and clicks is a bonus. Now that you’re considering more than just whether your ad was in the top position, you’re picking option B in this particular hypothetical.

The point here is not that a lower cost-per-click or lower conversion rate is always better, mind you, but that one metric without context can be misleading.

So What?

In marketing, we often talk about identifying the point of diminishing returns; determining how performance/results will scale with increasing the amount spent. Generally speaking, having your ad show up as high as possible in the search results is a good thing, it just shouldn’t come at the expense of overall performance.

Avoid fixating on one metric when evaluating your campaign’s success. Zoom out and look at the context instead of chasing something that won’t directly cause the outcome you’re looking for.

Claiming first position in the search results isn’t an outcome. Generating more leads on the same budget is an outcome.

Showing up first may indeed be the right move at a given time, but it can be expensive, so it’s the job of whoever is running your ad campaigns to analyze the ever-changing data and determine if it’s worth it for you. That’s just one of the ways we at IBA take managing our clients’ budgets very seriously, and if you’d like to hear more, we’d be happy to talk!