The Ultimate Guide To SERP Click Through Rates
Whilst browsing everyone’s favourite SEO site, I noticed a post in YOUmoz that I couldn’t quite work out. The figures that you can see there seemed wrong to me. Now, I happen to have fairly definitive numbers. The data you see below is derived from the results of 36,389,567 searches and 19,434,540 clicks on a variety of SERPs, from millions of users, covering a huge array of topics. The data is also from AOL, so whilst the interface isn’t Google’s, the listings displayed are.
N.B. This data is for organic listings only. There are no PPC clicks accounted for in data.
| Rank | Clicks | Click % | Delta #n-1 | Delta #1 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 8220278 | 42.30% | n/a | n/a |
| 2 | 2316738 | 11.92% | -71.82% | -71.82% |
| 3 | 1640751 | 8.44% | -29.18% | -80.04% |
| 4 | 1171642 | 6.03% | -28.59% | -85.75% |
| 5 | 943667 | 4.86% | -19.46% | -88.52% |
| 6 | 774718 | 3.99% | -17.90% | -90.58% |
| 7 | 655914 | 3.37% | -15.34% | -92.02% |
| 8 | 579206 | 2.98% | -11.69% | -92.95% |
| 9 | 549196 | 2.83% | -5.18% | -93.32% |
| 10 | 577325 | 2.97% | 5.12% | -92.98% |
| 11 | 127688 | 0.66% | -77.88% | -98.45% |
| 12 | 108555 | 0.56% | -14.98% | -98.68% |
| 13 | 101802 | 0.52% | -6.22% | -98.76% |
| 14 | 94221 | 0.48% | -7.45% | -98.85% |
| 15 | 91020 | 0.47% | -3.40% | -98.89% |
| 16 | 75006 | 0.39% | -17.59% | -99.09% |
| 17 | 70054 | 0.36% | -6.60% | -99.15% |
| 18 | 65832 | 0.34% | -6.03% | -99.20% |
| 19 | 62141 | 0.32% | -5.61% | -99.24% |
| 20 | 58384 | 0.30% | -6.05% | -99.29% |
| 21 | 55471 | 0.29% | -4.99% | -99.33% |
| 31 | 23041 | 0.12% | -58.46% | -99.72% |
| 41 | 14024 | 0.07% | -39.13% | -99.83% |
As you can see, the number one position recieves just over 42% of all clicks. Where this gets really interesting though is when you look at what can happen if you own most of the real estate on a good SERP. The top four results put together account for over two thirds of all clicks that will happen (68.69% in total). The top ten taken as a whole will give nearly nine tenths! (Actual total figure - 89.69%).
Drop onto page two, and you’re basically stuffed. Unless the term gets huge traffic, you’re not going to. We can see all the page two listings getting under 1%, and most getting less than 0.5% of the total number.
The other gem of information is noticing that of all the searches performed, 46.6% of people didn’t click on anything at all! So don’t think that just because people search for something they’re clicking on the results. Some searches will have virtually no clickthroughs onto listings.
As will all things though, it’s not quite that simple. Depending on PPC listings showing, and what the SERP is will obviously affect where and how people click, so your own mileage will vary. However, this should still act as a fairly useful guide in terms of what you can expect.
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Interesting and timely for me. Just went through a bunch of rankings last night and notated seven or so on a site where we ranked #8-10 and with a little effort, can move up… will be interesting to see if this is even loosely accurate as a prediction of traffic increase to predict future ROI. Thanks for sharing the data.
Interesting indeed, however the numbers from what I’ve seen can fluctuate dramatically depending on several factors. Price of goods/service being one of the big ones.
Certainly a good average across industries and terms here, but industry specific numbers could be much different and it’s something to keep in mind.
Message to market can make a big difference in response rate. For a given search term, the PPC ad was getting better results than the organic results. I used PPC to test various messages. Then modified the web page. Organic response (clicks) trippled and was outpulling the PPC ad.
John
DirectMarketResults.com
I find this to be out of whack for a couple reasons. First it assumes that a searcher will only click on one result, and that result will always totally satisfy. Not reality. Second it does not address that a great title will get attention if it answers the searchers need exactly.
True the top position may get a huge share of the first clicks, but unless the website answers the searchers expectation quickly they will back out and continue clicking on other results.
Actually, that’s not entirely true. You can download the datafile at this site. Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.
And you’d be surprised how little title formatting/wording affects things. Test it and see!
The data above is a distribution of results across their data set. The clicks that a specific result gets will depend on what gets displayed by the search engine. As Pete notes above, small change can effect the results. The challenge is finding the meaningful changes. The secondary challenge is the time needed for testing when you are looking at 100’s or 1000’s of keyword and ranking results.
John
DirectMarketResults.com
The engagement of the users depends greatly on three factors.
1.) The nature of the search request
2.) The weighting of the brands in the page
3.) The specific properties of the listing relative to the other results.
If all of these factors fall into place the CTR’s will of course be as demonstrated.
One interesting aspect to consider:-
If the top site gets a CTR of 42.30%, how many are bouncing back to the SERPS, affecting the quality of the 2nd and 3rd listings traffic?
If the marketer is savvy enough to leverage SERPS data (long tail and head) against the creative (Meta Description), of the listed pages, the level of engagement will always be superior and wastage will be significantly reduced leading to quality with quantity.
Max
Thanks for the data and analysis. I’d like to see the same data from Google. I think their UI and (more importantly) user base could significantly alter the results.