42% of people click on the top result, 12% on the second result

Somebody used the AOL search data released this week to find out the click stats for a serps page.

Rank Hits Percentage of total
1 3275637 42,25%
2 925507 11,94%
3 656290 8,47%
4 468703 6,05%
5 377877 4,87%
6 309669 3,99%
7 262140 3,38%
8 230981 2,98%
9 218748 2,82%
10 229909 2,97%

Rank Hits Percentage of total
1-10 6955461 89,71%
11-20 338558 4,37%
21-30 187744 2,42%
31-40 82751 1,07%
41-50 44500 0,57%
51-60 33590 0,43%
61-70 23354 0,30%
71-80 15960 0,21%
81-90 13430 0,17%
91-100 11178 0,14%
100 + 67383 0,87%



Via here and here

 

Great stuff Mad4 ... thanks for sharing!

 

interesting, i was expecting the second and third results to get the highest percentage

 

The thing to remember sandossu is a lot of the queries are domain (navigational) or company queries so the first result will be the one that the user wants. With generic queries like "auto insurance" the percentages won't be the same.

It certainly proves that we need to keep aiming for number 1.

 

Well, in theory and it seems in practice as well, the first result gets most clicks Users come across that result first and so they are most likley to clicik on it. However, I did not expect the gap between the first and 2nd result to be so wide.

 

Also have to take into account that AOL'ers are probably alot more likely to type in the name of a search engine into the search box, rather than us normal people who just go to the search engine first.

Side note: interesting but not that surprizing, check out the number of aol'ers who searched on anything with the phrase optimization in it, or the fact of how they didn't use the term seo

-Michael

 

That is very interesting that was not at all what I would have thought it would be. I figure it was 60%/30%/10% for the first 3.

 

alot of the searches that result in a click on the first result will be searches for actual urls.

alot of the searches in that data set was of the 'domain.com' type.

my 2 pence worth.

 

wow, less than half of the ppl click the first result...

 

Mad4 is right, a lot of people search for Mickey Mouse and land on Disney, but lesser people search for mouse cartoon, so yeah

IT

 

thanks for sharing

 

If it's any use I made an analysis on the entire clickthrough dataset (That's why the figures are slightly different from above).

Graphs and formatted table etc. on my blog

Rank # Clickthroughs % Delta #n-1 Delta #1
19434540 100%

1 8220278 42.30% n/a n/a
2 2316738 11.92% -71.82% -71.82%
3 1640751 8.44% -29.18% -80.04%
4 1171642 6.03% -28.59% -85.75%
5 943667 4.86% -19.46% -88.52%
6 774718 3.99% -17.90% -90.58%
7 655914 3.37% -15.34% -92.02%
8 579206 2.98% -11.69% -92.95%
9 549196 2.83% -5.18% -93.32%
10 577325 2.97% 5.12% -92.98%

11 127688 0.66% -77.88% -98.45%
12 108555 0.56% -14.98% -98.68%
13 101802 0.52% -6.22% -98.76%
14 94221 0.48% -7.45% -98.85%
15 91020 0.47% -3.40% -98.89%
16 75006 0.39% -17.59% -99.09%
17 70054 0.36% -6.60% -99.15%
18 65832 0.34% -6.03% -99.20%
19 62141 0.32% -5.61% -99.24%
20 58384 0.30% -6.05% -99.29%

21 55471 0.29% -4.99% -99.33%

31 23041 0.12% -58.46% -99.72%

41 14024 0.07% -39.13% -99.83%

 

Where did you get that from? That's not what the data says...

 

That's why so important to be numver 1

 

NOT picking on you, seriously... but with rep like that and you still don't know that 42% IS less than half?

-Michael

 

I agree, I would have not thought it would have been such a large gap between the 1st and 2nd.

I new that the 1st gets the most clicks followed by the 2nd and 3rd.

 

I'm no maths expert and may have a bit of a dumb day but look at what it says:

To me it says, out of all the combined clicks for spot 1 to 10, number one gets 42.25%. It does not mean, out of all the people clicking, only 42.35% clicks the number one.

To put it in simple data:

Total clicks: 100

1. 42 clicks
2 12
3 8
4 6
5 5
6 4
7 3
8 3
9 3
10 3
11+ 14 combined

It doesn't represent who clicks what. There is no data about individual clicks in what he quoted. It's only about total clicks.

I hope that explains my point of view.

 

TOPS is right. I still don't have time to study the AOL data leak so i thought it was like a survery for how many % of click per thousand ppl or sth like that

 

If I'm right, then Mad4 got the title grossly wrong as well.

 

TOPS, you are right, my bad. I was looking at it wrong as well.

-Michael