Click Patterns for the Top SERPs - Latest Research

[Onders]

I remember reading some research a couple of years back about what percentage of people (roughly!) would click on the top result in the SERPS - and so on to give an indication of how important an extra position is.

Does anyone know if there is any up-to-date research or stats on this? I go on the principle that if I get a top position for a keyphrase and my metas and product are aligned to that key phrase - I should be converting about 50% of the searches. I also remember hearing that approx 40% of searchers went to the PPC on the right hand side, but is this still the commonly held belief?

If you could piece this data together with rankings and click throughs it would be seriously helpful in optimising meta data... and conversions..

[pavlovapete]

Hi Onders,

I did see some newer stats a couple of weeks ago - cannot remember where. I think it may have been on an analytics blog. I'll have a poke around but I am not confident that I'll find it again. I think I recall:
- 85% on SERPs
- 15% on PPC
- ~60% do not go to the second page of SERPs
Your vertical will also have an impact I suspect.

Regarding metas - metas may not "speak to" long tail queries. And I do not know how Google "decides" to show either a meta or a snippet/ shingles.

Cheers

[Onders]

Hi pete - thanks for that info, will try and see if I can find anything similar. Am not 100% sure why these stats don't get more prominence - I agree about it depending what vertical you're targeting, but the relative importance of positions is surely something everyone wants figures on. Or am i being dumb about this?

[idolw]

wow, 85/15 SERPs/PPC ratio seems not the way google wants to go.

[Onders]

There's some good research you can find by typing "where do people click" into google... but the data is from 2006.

With the all the extra's on a results page - news, images, P1-3 etc I suppose getting some decenet stats also becomes harder.

Am yet to find anything that really takes the PPC listings into account - will carry on looking!

[HuskyPup]

wow, 85/15 SERPs/PPC ratio seems not the way google wants to go.

Really? If I were getting a 15% CTR from my pages I would be more than happy, in fact I'd be retired by now!