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Posted May 26 2010, 10:30 AM by Peter A. Prestipino

Chitika has released some interesting research related to the the value of a first position listing on Google. According to the data, it's worth a lot - double the traffic of the second spot.

Chitika examined traffic coming into its advertising network from Google and broke it down by Google results placement. The first position drove 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, nearly as much as slots 2 through 5 provided combined and more than positions 5 through 20 combined.

"Obviously, everyone knows that the #1 spot on Google is where you want to be," says Chitika research director Daniel Ruby. "It’s just kind of shocking to look at the numbers and see just how important it is, and how much of a jump there is from 2 to 1."

Another very interesting finding from the research is the impact of moving from page two to page one. For example, moving from the 11th position to the 10th results in a 143% increase in traffic. The base number of course is very low as the jump is from 1.11% to 2.71% of traffic but it's certainly shows how meaningful it is to move up the SERPs towards that desired position of number one.