Penn State Study: Paid + Organic Listing = 15% Clickthrough Rate

Penn State’s Jim Jansen announced a recent study they just finished that looked at the click through rate of search ads. They studied hundreds of thousands of users, as they interacted with Dogpile, the popular meta search engine.

The findings were somewhat surprising to  Jansen. The clickthrough rate on an ad when it was supported by an organic listing was only 15 percent. He thought having an organic and paid listing would increase the click through rate to a number higher than 15 percent. His study also found that “35 percent of queries” did not result in any ad clicks ad all.

The full study was published in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising. I emailed Professor Jansen for more details and hope to update this article as soon as I get those details.

Postscript: Professor Jansen sent me a link to a PDF of the report named Investigating customer click through behaviour with integrated sponsored and nonsponsored results.