SERP Position and Click Through Rate

AOL Clickthrough Data

Quite old data now, but still important to know how the position collects traffic. In 2006, AOL released information on how users clicked on results for searches. The dataset contained 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs. The large sample size means that the data should be a good representation of users behaviour on average.

Clickthrough Data Results

Figure 1. Percentage of Clicks against SERP Position

Figure 1. shows the percentage of clickthroughs on a result on the SERPs with position of that result. As can be seen, it is really important to be in first position, gaining more than three times the number of clicks than if you were at position 2. As the position number increases, the percent of clickthroughs you can obtain decreases less rapidly. With around 6-3% being obtained from positions 4 to 10. As very few users click on to the next page, the chance of a click through declines to around 0.5%. To put this in perspective, your site will get around 1-2 hits out of every 200 searches made for a term that puts your site on page two.

These results are also very informative. Almost 90% of clicks take place on the first page. The second page taking only 4% and the remaining pages comprising 6%. The figure are listed below:

%age of traffic from page 1 89.68 %page of traffic from page 2 4.40 %age from all other pages 5.92 This information can be used in conjunction with the search volume to allow you to calculate the estimated number of visitors from a particular search engine for a given position.

Conclusion

These results emphasise the importance of the first three slots on the first page if you want to drive traffic to your site. Whether they will stay and convert when they get there is a matter of usability.