Average click through rates – Lies Damn Lies and Statistics
Many of us may remember a number of years back now that AOL released a whole pile of useage data for analysis and general consumption, some bright sparks worked out it could be used to determine the average click through rates based on the position of your website in the SERPS for any particular term.
The figure that was banded about was around 40% for position one dropping to 20% for two and further from that. However after looking at the stats it is obvious that a mistake was made the percentages we calculated by comparing the positions clicks, to the total number of clicks. However this gives average percentage of clicks not searches and this was in error. Because what we all want to know if we get 50,000 searches for this term how much traffic do I think I shoudl be getting.
Remember only 70% of searches click on a natural listing , 30 % click on paid positions, also many users don’t click at all and refine there search or wander off and eat their tea instead. Taking this into consideration the averages are much smaller with only about 22.6 % of searches becomeing a click on the first listing. As far as I can make out the figures should of looked like this.
| Position | Clicks | Average CTR |
|
1 |
8,220,278.00 |
22.60% |
|
2 |
2,316,738.00 |
6.37% |
|
3 |
1,640,751.00 |
4.51% |
|
4 |
1,171,642.00 |
3.22% |
|
5 |
943,667.00 |
2.59% |
|
6 |
774,718.00 |
2.13% |
|
7 |
655,914.00 |
1.80% |
|
8 |
579,206.00 |
1.59% |
|
9 |
549,196.00 |
1.51% |
|
10 |
577,325.00 |
1.59% |
|
11 |
127,688.00 |
0.35% |
|
12 |
108,555.00 |
0.30% |
|
13 |
101,802.00 |
0.28% |
|
14 |
94,221.00 |
0.26% |
|
15 |
91,020.00 |
0.25% |
|
16 |
75,006.00 |
0.21% |
|
17 |
70,054.00 |
0.19% |
|
18 |
65,832.00 |
0.18% |
|
19 |
62,141.00 |
0.17% |
|
20 |
58,384.00 |
0.16% |
| No Natural click |
16,946,938.00 |
46.60% |
| Total searches |
36,369,567.00 |
