Do visitors from search engines click?

or do they just pop in then move on?

[annej]

I've noticed in my stats that visitors who come in on search engines usually don't stay and visit more pages. I find that visitors coming through links from other sites, bookmarks or directly putting in the URL stay on my sites much longer.

I'm just curious which kind of visitors are more likely to click on an ad. Does anyone have a way to measure this?

I'm guessing the visitors who stay around are more likely to buy books as my books are usually hard to find books on the specific topic related to the article on the page. But ad clicks might be different.

[driris]

95 % of my visitors are from search engines( 70 % from yahoo). and i have very good ctr (>3%).

[david_uk]

I guess it depends on if the surfer found what they were looking for when they landed on your site. If they have found what they searched for, then it's likely they will stay and have a good look. Most of my traffic also comes from search engines, and I have to say that the ctr is good - >6%.

As to measuring this, I don't know. I suppose you need to go partially on your webmaster's instincts when browsing the logfiles to an extent.

[jetteroheller]

From where else should visitors come?

Search engines make more than 90% of my visitors.

I made the experience, that also very relevant posts in newsgroups or forums create a visitor stream with a very low CTR.

Best CTR is from visitors coming from search engines.

[annej]

I imagine it depends on what kind of a site you have how many come in through a search engine.

Just about everyone interested in my topic has already found my sites as they do well in any topic related search word or phrase in the serps. So basically the people coming in through search engines are either new to the Internet or have just become interested in the topic.

So only about half my visitors come from search engines. The rest are return visitors or have come in through a link from a related site or mail list or word or mouth (or email)

I'd love to know how differently the two groups might be in terms of clicking on adsense ads or buying affiliate products.