Weight of search results clickthrough on rank

results, clickthrough

[sore66]

Does CTR reinforce ranking in organic results? Does purchase on the landing also reinforce higher position in organic results?

[tedster]

Because you ask about both CTR and purchase, it makes me think you are asking about whether Adwords success or failure influences the organic search results. If that's the question, the answer is no.

However, there's no doubt that Google does watch the organic results for which item gets clicked. But in the organic results there's no way for a search engine to know if the click resulted in a purchase. That's why I assume you are asking about Adwords CTR.

[sore66]

If google cookies have the ability to report back credit card usage or google is in some way aware of purchase behaviour on clickthru past the search result page when tracking surfers, then I wonder if high clickthru to purchase results in higher organic rank, as part of the relevancy algorithm...

[tedster]

Cookies can't actively report anything -- the domain that placed the cookie needs to retrieve the cookie. And Google can't retrieve a cookie from a page unless that page is also serving something from the Google domain.

Otherwise Google has no access to the browser at the critical moment. The only way that happens is when a site is using Google to track Adwords conversions. And even then, as far as I can tell, they are looking for a specific Adwords cookie that was placed when the ad was clicked, and not a general Google cookie.

Now I suppose the Google Toolbar might be able to report when the user goes to any shopping cart page or sales confirmation page -- but that would be extremely intrusive, and (dare I say) just a touch evil in my book.

I don't think this approach, even if possible technically, is something that Google would persue within the organic results. Google wants to know if their results gave a page that satisfied the user --- one that was relevant to the search. There are many types of relevancy for searches and only some kinds of relevancy would result in a sale.

One thing Google can watch easily is if, after one click, the searcher comes right back to the organic results page and clicks on a different page. If that happens a lot, then Google might decide that their algorithm needs some tweaking. But I still don't think they would directly make any change to how that one particular page is ranked for that search. Such an approach just wouldn't scale well, as far as I can see.