Is there any statistical information around that shows user habits on the website in the following areas. 1) Users clicking Adwords vs Serps (what gets clicked more) 2) Serps Postions 1 to 10 (% of pos 1 vs pos 2 and so on) 3) Serps Page 1 to 2 (% of first page clicks vs 2nd)
1) I'd say that would be common sense; SERPs are something that an Internet user are seeking, while advertisements aren't. Click through rates are commonly known to be around 3% for webmasters, and you can use your own experiences to judge how often you make a search and click a link (near 100%) 2) http://www.redcardinal.ie/search-en...08-2006/clickthrough-analysis-of-aol-datatgz/ 3) (same as above)
I don't have any links but from what I've read and from my experience... Adwords ads that are in the top 3 and show up above search results can have anywhere from 15% CTR to 50% CTR(though these will cost the most). Adwords in the right sidebar have very low clickthrough rates, 1 per 100 search and lower. As far as the top 10 organic results, aol released a study and it showed that 1st postion gets like 85% of the clicks, 2nd gets 10%, 3rd gets 5% and everything below that gets hardly any(and 2nd page results get very little traffic). So if you're not ranking in the top 3 or so for a certain keyword you're not going to get much traffic from it. This can vary depending on the quality of the search results(and wheather or not people find what they were looking for in the first result they click), but its usually pretty much like that as google is pretty good with providing relevant results. If you want to target keywords you should work on ranking for a few high search volume ones(using the homepage of your site and setting the page title as the keyword you want to rank for, then getting backlinks with that word as the anchor text), or just write lots and lots of blog posts or content pages and get traffic from the long tail results rotation that google does.
In addition to what HarrisonJ mentioned, you should already be running your own analytics program. You could judge what gives the most traffic through your own experiences. And although HarrisonJ is correct, I have found that some niches and terms will get a lot of traffic several pages away from the top result. I have a couple of niches like that.