Search Illustrated: Search Engine Click-Thru Behavior; You've Got To Be In The Top Ten!

In search marketing, stats are important. But which metrics should you pay attention to? Page views? More elaborate measures with fancy acronyms like ROI or ROAS?

There’s one metric that’s extremely important, according to a study of searcher behavior by iProspect. As simple (or simplistic) as it sounds, those top ten rankings that all serious search marketers pine away for really are important. Today’s Search Illustrated shows why:

Graphic by Elliance, an eMarketing firm specializing in results-driven search engine marketing, web site design, and outbound eMarketing campaigns. The firm is the creator of the ennect online marketing toolkit. The Search Illustrated column appears Tuesdays at Search Engine Land.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Infographics | Search Illustrated

Read before commenting! We welcome constructive comments and allow any that meet our common sense criteria. This means being respectful and polite to others. It means providing helpful information that contributes to a story or discussion. It means leaving links only that substantially add further to a discussion. Comments using foul language, being disrespectful to others or otherwise violating what we believe are common sense standards of discussion will be deleted. Comments may also be removed if they are posted from anonymous accounts. You can read more about our comments policy here.

http://www.ericlander.com/ Eric Lander

I’m confused.

Is this to say that only 90% of the users hitting the search results are clicking listings? Or, is the math in the above graphic incorrect having only shown 90% of users?

Either way, I’m surprised the second page gets the percentages it does. Seems lofty compared to what my expectations would’ve been.
http://www.seo-blog.com MichaelDuz

I agree with Eric there is something very odd about these percentages.

How many users were involved in the study? How many searches were there in total?

An analysis of the AOL data accidentally released last year based on approximately 20 million web queries collected from approximately 650 thousand users shows a click through rate for the first page of results of 89.68% and 4.40% for the second.

You can see the results here Position and Clickthrough.

Interestingly the ninth position gets marginally less clickthroughs than the tenth position.

I built a tool based on the AOL data that shows this quite nicely Position and Clickthrough Tool.

- Michael
Matt

Doing a quick search on Google these figures were calculated from an online survey they carried out way back in Jan 06. It is taken from 2,369 respondents who were asked 25 closed questions on their web habits.

These specific figures were taken from the question “When you perform a search on search engines and are looking at the results, approx how many entries do you look at before clicking one.” Not exactly scientific and explains the lower than expected percentage.

They also state in the findings “A full 90% of users clicked on results in first 3 pages” so it’s not one of those miscalculations we all love to pick up on.
http://www.aosep.com MattC

What search engines do these numbers represent?
http://threadwatcher.com Bompa

These numbers are pretty muc inline with a Penn State study done years ago, 2003 I think.

“Web users are picky and impatient, typically visiting only the first three results from a query, with one in five searchers spending 60 seconds or less on a linked Web document, according to Penn State researchers. ”

mikesmarketing has a summary here
http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/marketing-tips/search-engine-user-study.html

This Google search has the study at #2 for me. It’s the psu.edu site:

intitle:”An Analysis of Web Documents Retrieved and Viewed”

Possibly it’s the AOL data that is flawed. I know you dont want to hear that, cuz you have that on your HDD and can have fun with all sorts of queries. LOL

Bompa
threadwatcher.com