Google Webmaster Tools recently released a very cool feature in the Top Search Queries report: Clickthrough Rate
Now you can see not only which keywords generate the most impressions on Google for your domain, but also what the CTR of each keyword is. Even cooler is you can get a sense of what your overall domain’s CTR is and track how that changes over time as a result of SEO changes, SEM and other marketing.
I thought it would be interesting to look at data on a variety of sites to get a sense of what the average clickthrough rate from Google SERPs was. The sites I looked at are not necessarily a perfect cross-section of Web sites but I think there’s enough volume there to be interesting data. And perhaps my sharing this will encourage others to put their data out there so we can get a more comprehensive picture.
So without further ado here’s the data:
Total Impressions: 17,632,470
Total Click-Throughs: 1,981,048
Click-Through-Rate: 11.24%
It actually should be higher but my pathetic little blog is bringing the average down with a 0.80% CTR. That’s what I get for ranking for things like “you suck” and “trainspotting toilet”.
So what’s your Google CTR?
Update: As one of my favorite readers, the #1 New Zealand SEO, mentions below, this data is based on samples and is likely not totally spot on. As an example, according to Google Analytics this blog got 424 visits from over the past 30 days from a particular query, while GWT Clickthroughs says I only got 170 visits. So this data is not the gospel, but rather an interpretation of the gospel. Based on some early feedback it seems like other SEOs are seeing similar CTRs.
8 Response Comments
Hi Andrew,
The numbers reported by this tool (at least in the main graph) leads me to be a bit wary of the numbers being reported.
1, They seem to be rounded
2, Very similar numbers day to day
3, Click throughs are about 1/4 of what we actually get
It could be that on larger it is less accurate & samples. Maybe less influence from long tail searches.
Comparing this to smaller sites the clicks & impressions seem more accurate.
Anyway worked out to 13.45% click through rate.
Nice to see you here again Richard!
Just as with Google Analytics the data is likely culled from samples so its accuracy is suspect.
I’ll update the post to reflect this.
Hi Andrew….
have watched our own and clients reports with great interest in the past few weeks too…
what I’ve found is that Urchin reports very diff totals for both impressions and CTRs…while a couple of sites that we use Google Analytics on, are a bit closer…
but in fact, as I guess others have also seen, this is a “sample interpretation” o nly…ie NOT spot-on at least as far as we can gather.
how that might help our SEO practice, I’m still unsure of….but will continue to monitor same, eh!
Jim
Jim, my initial thoughts are that those keywords that are seeing hi CTR and correspondingly high conversion are ripe for focusing on increasing rankings and improving rankings for variations. You also could study the title tags and snippets that display for these queries and use them to inform rewriting titles and meta descriptions across the site.
I thought might was below average until reading this post. I get around 12% if I don’t include images searches. Blog happens to have a image rank on the first page for a single word that has a horrible 2% ctr. Another thing I have noticed about this report from Google webmaster tools is that they seem to be using some weird way of rounding the numbers, would like to see them a little bit closer to the real numbers.
My average CTR is only 0.41%. I do not know how to improve it.
Hey Andrew,
My clickthrough rate for my e-comm site last month was either A:) 10% B:) 5% or C:) 2%. It was one of them, really. If you could put one word next to each of these CTR’s, what would it be (assuming everything in the universe was equal, unlike reality).
My site is getting 1,00,000 pageviews but avg CTR is 4.23% ? is it ok or i have to do something to increase it.