Ever since the famous AOL data leak of 2006 people have been endlessly quoting the same old figures when asked for amount of clicks a particular ranking gets.
Recently the data has become a lot more accurate thanks to the release of click data in Google Webmaster Tools and a new study by the Chitika ad network.
From the AOL data we can see that first place gets 42% of traffic, compared to just 11.9% for second place. That seems too high to me.
Next up we have a study by Neil Walker showing 46.37% for first and 29.43% for second – this is based on Webmaster Tools data across 2700 keywords.
Finally we have the Chitika study which shows that first place gets 34.35% compared to 16.96% in second.
There are no real conclusions to be drawn from this, other than first place always gets the lions share of visitors. I would like to see a study purely on non-brand keywords and also some kind of study on keywords with AdWords and keywords without AdWords to see what affect that has on CTR across the results.
Our main observation from client data is that first normally gets about twice the traffic as second which is a pretty big jump.
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Universal search has to be taken into consideration too imo. I personally think the CTR given for 1st is higher than it actually would be…
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Great stuff Patrick,
I’d like to bring your idea one step further and see a report where they include map listings along with organic and AdWords listings.
Then we would have some serious data and my proposals would look a whole lot better:)
Rob
More comments from Robert CarpenterHi Patrick, nice to meet you at Internet World, thanks for the reference, the Chitika study is also interesting, i’ll give you an update next week, because the CTR data I created I’m just going through labeling the query as either:
1) Brand
2) Product Specific
3) location based
Great analysis there. I would be very interested to see how CTRs change across niches. Google’s moto is to get people of it’s search engine as quickly as possible.
Thank you Patrick, for useful information.
Will be interesting to look in those 2700 Keywords
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Thanks
More comments from Patrick AltoftThe outcome is not a surprise, first will always get a bulk of the clicks but I would also like more variables thrown in as already mentioned. The AOL numbers seem a little to low for 2nd place.
Patrick. I strongly agree with this report and nice to see recent useful information.
It's interesting to see these figures, but the results are not really that surprising. One site I have consistently ranks at #2 for a fun keyword phrase. #1 is a popular brand with a strong network behind it. The CTR for my site is 9%.
Other sites I have that rank at #2 have a CTR of about 16%.
Thank you for the analysis. When looking at SEO strategy this info adds a lot of value. In the end the #1 position is still the place to aim for.
I would also love to see how this varies with Google’s universal search results. If you have videos or images at third position, or a “did you mean?” result, how does that affect first position click through.
There are just so many variables to consider in a study like this.
Thanks Patrick for this useful information. I hope to see some changes on those figures in the future.
Google now gives this information to us with their search queries tool in Webmaster Tools.
I'd be interested to get thoughts on just how accurate this new feature is though.
Google Search Queries Tool is great to use if you have an interest in this sort of data the information provided is great.
I wonder if what % of the estimated total search count for a particular key phrase receives clicks. In other words if a phrase is supposed to get 100,000 people landing on that google page to 90%, 80% or maybe 10% of those people actually click one of the ten organic results. Thanks
It would certainly be interesting to see what happens when you have both a natural listing at #1 and a PPC ad in the top 3 positions. For one of our clients the main bulk of their traffic (>80%) still comes from the PPC ad in this scenario. We are due to experiment with turning the PPC ad off to see what impact this may have on overall traffic.
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