Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
#1) 99% of the clicks
#2) .02%
#3) .001%
and so on?
#1 (organic) - 35%
#2 (organic) - 15%
#3 (organic) - 7.5%
#4 (organic) - 5%
#5 (organic) - 2.5%
#6 (organic) - 2.5%
#7 (organic) - 2.5%
#8 (organic) - 2.5%
#9 (organic) - 5%
#10 (organic) - 10%
#1 (paid) - 6.5%
#2 (paid) - 3%
#3 (paid) - 2%
#4 (paid) - 1%
Although throw in some exceptionally relevant/well-written titles/summaries...
arran.
Yes! You can!
arran's #'s are in the same ballpark as mine. It depends upon the search term and site. Some close sales better and cause people to cease searching.
arran's numbers for "paid search" are a few % higher than mine, but it all depends upon your market.
#1 definatley gets the most clicks, for me # 10 gets more clicks than the #1 sponsor, but it depends upon the market and competition.
In highly competitive markets the true SE results have a better chance of looking good, therefore the sponsored clicks will be lower.
So will the paid results with the light blue background get the most clicks?
Nope....never, try it out!.
Write the best Ad possible and see what happens!
If you get an 8% CTR in a competitive field you did great. Don't worry if you only got a 2% CTR though, that wouldn't be so bad!
Maybe more like:
#1 (organic) - 35%
#2 (organic) - 15%
#3 (organic) - 7.5%
#4 (organic) - 5%
#5 (organic) - 2.5%
#6 (organic) - 2.5%
#7 (organic) - 2.5%
#8 (organic) - 2.5%
#9 (organic) - 5%
#10 (organic) - 10%
This seems pretty plausible to me, but I think there's a bigger gap between numbers 3-4 and numbers 5-8.
I find it infuriating that going up from numbers 9-10 can mean less clicks, not more, but I guess that should just be an extra spur to push on to the top slots.
There was some research on this, reported by Associated Press just over a year ago (24 Jan 05) but based on surveys conducted in May-June 04...
Only 1 in 6 users of Internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements, a new survey finds...
Google Inc. marks such ads as "sponsored links," Yahoo Inc. terms them "sponsor results" and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN uses "sponsored sites." Such ads are placed to the right and on top of the regular search results, in some cases highlighted in a different color.
But only 38 percent of Web searchers even know of the distinction, and of those, not even half 47 percent say they can always tell which are paid.Full story on MSNBC [msnbc.msn.com]
[edited by: tedster at 6:07 pm (utc) on Mar. 18, 2006]
[edit reason] shorten quote [/edit]
I have the luxury of knowing what my stats have been for my main site (generally in #8 or #9 position for a one-word competitive search) and the stats for a site that generally comes up #1 or #2 for the same search. The guy doesn't know or doesn't care that his stats are accessible to anyone because they're not password protected. Presumably he's relying on obscurity as security, but I guessed the URL.
Anyway, for this one word search he gets 2 to 3 times as many visitors from Google as my site does. Overall, both of our sites have the same amount of traffic because I get more hits for a large variety of 2 and 3 word phrases.
What's more, one person in three who visits his site for this keyphrase takes one look at the index page and backs out in a hurry. It's not exactly amateurish, but it doesn't convey a sense of professionalism. I wish all the other sites above mine also left their stats exposed!
You can read about it here:
[enquiro.com...]
Great info for this question.
Allwoing for 'laboratory' conditions, it makes full sense, and isn't founded on assumptions.
Of course there are still a lot of people who just click the #1 result. But with many top results having titles like "widgets buy widgets widgets are great" and a meta description that looks about the same there is a good chance searchers will look on down.
"widgets buy widgets widgets are great"
I watched my wife surfing the other day and noticed she went down to result 4, I asked why, she stated look at the words (she meant the title) it was similar to above but result 3 and 4 had proper meaning
On a several organic results for competitive terms I see 1, 2, sometimes 3 being unrelated (typically containing one of the terms but in a totally different context or with one key search term virtually ignored).
So, for example a search for CITYNAME WIDGETS (where the searcher is most interested in widgets in a particular city) puts several WIDGETS results from any city ahead of CITYNAME WIDGETS in the organic results. This can reach ridiculous levels if CITYNAME is on a diferent continent than the first several results.
And I am not talking about general widgets sites with widgets in all cities coming first. I mean highly specific widgets for one particular cityname coming 1,2.
My suspicion is the general distribtion suggested is probably about right IF #1 is sematically correct but lately on Google it often seems not.
annej: I agree completely that being further down the results isn't necessarily a barrier. For one thing your title and snippet may be better crafted, as you suggested. And as I suggested your whole site may be better designed of more informative, meaning that you get more "secondary" traffic, after the surfer has tried sites above yours, and also you can get (as I've found) as much or even more traffic overall by being found on a greater variety of search terms. Still, movin' on up in the results is something that makes me happy.
even more traffic overall by being found on a greater variety of search terms
This is such an important point. It's great to rank well on your sites top keywords but in truth we all get a huge number of people finding pages on our sites through thousands of specific key word phrases.
