Whats the average scale of clicks between 1st and 10th in the serps

How many clicks for number one vs number 5 for example.

[JS_Harris]

I'm just looking for ballpark percentages, I know that other factors play a role, but I'm curious to know that if I'm getting x amount of clicks at number 5, what can I expect from other positions?

Has a study on this been done?

If not I can say that when my site was ranked #9 is got me about 12% fewer clicks than when it moved to #7. Now at #5 is gets a good 31% more hits (according to analytics) than #9. Its not linear, but what will each of the spots above bring?

edit:I don't mean sitewide hits, I mean actual searches and clicks for a specific keyword, if that helps.

[edited by: JS_Harris at 12:08 pm (utc) on Dec. 1, 2007]

[nomis5]

Your comment about it not being linear matches waht I see. It's exponential. A key phrase at 9th in Google, for my sites, is almost irrelevant for me. At 4th it's an earner, at 1st it might roughly earn 20 times more than a 4th position.

Site subject obviously affects the importance of position in Google SERPS.

[callivert]

there is hard data on this.
search for: aol search data SERP CTR
or something similar.
in short, position 1: around 42%, position 10, 3%. positions 11 and further, less than 1%

[JS_Harris]

I searched your suggestion and found this...

Results in:
Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less

It seems to be from a reputable source and my data from bouncing around in the bottom 5 spots seems to be fairly close. Thanks for the search terms.

[JS_Harris]

Just an observational question based on the above - do people really perform almost two searches on average before clicking once?

If so, that deserves some study. You could conceivably find a major reason or two that first search results are ignored, build stronger titles and descriptions with those reasons in mind and return your site up top on the first search terms more often.

A 50% search bounce rate is substantial if its coming from actual visitors and not automated calls.

[limoshawn]

just checking my math, it looks like according to the numbers from JS that the #1 position has about a 22% CTR. That seems a bit lower than I would have expected but still much better than the (my) average AdWords CTR.

[JS_Harris]

just over 2 million clicks for position one out of just under 5 million, your math is off a little bit. It's closer to 50%

[limoshawn]

9,038,794 searches, 2,075,765 clicked on 1st result, 1st position I believe has a 22.96% CTR if I'm reading it correct.

[LifeinAsia]

limoshawn is correct with the CTR calc.
I think JS_Harris is refering to the percentage of ads actually clicked.

Both can be relevant metrics.