Do you have an updated graph? Would be great to see AdWords clickthrough compared to Organic. I’ve heard rations like 15/85 in favour of organic.

One thing, a lot of people (myself included) have made the mistake of using your numbers as click-through-rates, even though you clearly indicate that it’s “% share of ClickThroughs”.

Not that it matters too much, the CTR values are slightly different:
#1 39.33, #2 11.08, #3 7.85, #4 5.61, #5 4.52, #6 3.71, #7 3.14, #8 2.77, #9 2.63, #10 2.76

When you start breaking the data down by classification, then “% share” and CTR can vary by quite a bit.

Source:
http://dougneubauer.com/2010/10/click-through-rates-the-aol-data-revisited/

I’ve been revisiting the AOL data and breaking it out by search demographics: navigational searches, informational searches, comparison shoppers, etc.

The search patterns and click through rates vary quite a bit between the different search categories. For example: For navigational searchers the drop-off in CTRs between #1 and #2 is 85%. For comparison shoppers it’s 32%. (Which is pretty close to the 28% number that you got.)

If anyone is interested, more detailed data is here:
http://dougneubauer.com/2010/10/click-through-rates-and-search-classification/

Thanks for the interesting read

Another factor could be the number of ads appearing above the SERP results. Sometimes there are three ads and sometimes less.
Thanks again for the article. Very useful.

@Matt – Hope it helps.

@Dave – good points, and thanks for joining the conversation. I agree that these stats should only be viewed as guides in aggregate. Actual figures will vary for all queries.

Thanks to all for comments.

Thanks again. Matt

Top work

MD Monkeyfishmarketing

I’ve not read/seen any research LBL impact on CTR. Given the level of iteration on the design of local business listings I’ve seen over time I imagine these stats would change a lot also. Sorry I cant help more

Hi Anant

From your mention of “exact match” I wonder if you’re talking about Adwords? This research is old now, but covered 35m search results which I would think is a slightly better sample than 50 client sites. The stats only contained clicks on organic results, so you should read this as the position clicked on. I’ve no idea how you can correlate position to click ratios as the only people who know this are the search engines (rankings are fluid and vary by multiple factors).

As I mentioned, I’m guess =ing you’re talking about PPC which is not the subject matter if the stats here. Thanks for commenting though.

Rgds
Richard

Typically most people mistake searches for traffic, allocated 80% to search and then a further 90% to page one of which a best guess calculation would say at least 40% goes to position 1 which is not quite correct.

We have done a lot of work in this area and have worked back using data from over 50 clients to determine the roughly search to click ratio for top positions. This might be disappointing to many but we have found that No 1 position gets roughly 8-15% of the total searches on exact match; unless of course the keyword is extremely niche then you might get up to 30% tops.

I’m wondering if you are aware of any studies in process or that have preliminary data on how the Google Local Business Listings at the top of the page are affecting this skew? My hunch is that some will scroll down to the “real” organic listings and bypass them altogether and that others will click away beginning at the top.

Any discussions / data that you can share on this?

Thanks,

Becky

The resulting graph shows the % of click-throughs from the top 10 results (as well as a best-fit data regression line).

http://www.reflectionsfromtheriver.com/2009/07/meta-analysis-of-ctr-from-natural-search-results-serps/

Alex Muir

Thanks for the informative and helpful article.

Wow, there are actually people that clicks beyond the 2nd page. The #41 gets 0.07% lol. I always assumed that people will go at most the first two pages…

The stats came from a very large dataset, and are aggregated data so you can view them as ‘in general’. I’m sure if you segment the data there will be different results, and it’s interesting that you mention your particular findings. Thanks for dropping by and commenting.

Rgds
Richard

Hmm my comment disappeared. I try again.

Very nice post.

Our research about CTR in organic search show some difference.
First of all it dependence how many word have the user used. Ex. if he use 3 or 4 words the CTR are must higher. Also the competition have influence for the result. Where the competition is very high the expected CTR a must lower.

Have you any thoughts about that.

Henrik
IIH Nordic

Very informative post. Thanks a lot for sharing!

I understand that these findings represent a snapshot of your AOL data and assume that although other people may get slightly different results that the basic principle will remain the same, namely that if you are not in the top position in the organic search results you are losing out on a lot of traffic.

Trust you won’t mind if I share your results with my blog readers and link back to this post.

All the best,
Francois du Toit

Great article!
I´ve already subscribed the feeds.

Maybe you missed the details of the dataset this was derived from? It includes 500k searches, so is an aggregate measure of click through. Not for a single keyword, branded or otherwise.

I hope this helps.
Rgds and thanks for commenting
Richard