Google Clickthrough Data - a Study

[driller41]

Here is some interesting information on clickthrough data from google, their main point is that the current % of clicks for a position 1 listing is now around 18% whereas previous studies had it in the 40% region.

Also Bing is even lower.

If you also threw local search into the brew I would guess the number 1 position would be <10%

[searchengineland.com...]

[aristotle]

The article also says:
According to Slingshot’s research, a number one ranking on Google gets about an 18% click-thru rate and the number two organic listing gets about 10% CTR. Both of those are about double the CTRs of comparable organic listings on Bing — 9.66% and 5.51%, respectively.

18% CTR for number 1 in Google is bad enough, but why is it even worse on Bing? I doubt that the quality of the SERPs has much to do with it, at least in my searches there usually isn't much difference between Bing and Google first page results. But I thought that Google usually has more ads above the organic listings, so would have expected the CTR for number 1 organic to be higher on Bing. Also, I thought that big brands do just as well on Bing, or even better.

[tedster]

The lead sentence is the summary and grabber "Only 52% of Google users click on an organic search result found on page one, and only 26% of Bing users do the same."

I've been aware for a couple of years that many 1-to-2 word queries on Google get no click at all - that is, up to 40% of users or so will reformulate their query instead of clicking on any result. So when you factor in these "no-click" users with the non-organic clicks, then the 52% number is not that big a surprise to me.

However, Bing showing only a 26% organic click rate is the real shocker. I honestly don't get that. Makes me wonder about the study's methodology.

[Simsi]

However, Bing showing only a 26% organic click rate is the real shocker. I honestly don't get that. Makes me wonder about the study's methodology.

At the bottom of that CTR page is a link to an "Eye Tracking Study". In there, it says:

The main difference in activity was in time spent looking at organic search results; searchers on Google spent four more seconds looking there than Bing users did.

In percentage terms, that's about a 30% difference (14.7 secs and 10.7 secs), which may go some way to explaining it.

[leadegroot]

The public is becoming more educated - they have learned how to rephrase searches when they don't see anything relevant, and they've learnt there is a second page.
Hurray!