Insights on Organic Search Engine Positions and the % of Clicks

The following breakdown can be made of the position in the organic listings and the approx. percentage of the traffic is sent to this position. I used this information lately in a paper and I think it might be interesting for you guys/girls too.

Overall Percent of Clicks
Pos. %
1. 42.13%
2. 11.90%
3. 8.50%
4. 6.06%
5. 4.92%
6. 4.05%
7. 3.41%
8. 3.01%
9. 2.85%
10. 2.99%

Relative Click Volume vs #1
Pos. %
2. 3.5x less
3. 4.9x less
4. 6.9x less
5. 8.5x less
6. 10.4x less
7. 12.3x less
8. 14.0x less
9. 14.8x less
10. 14.1x less

1st page totals: 89.82%
2nd page totals: 10.18%

Based on this data, if your websites ranks 8, 9, or 10 for any specific keyword it could already increase the traffic for that keyword 1,400% by ranking #1. Even jumping from position #8 to #3 can triple your traffic. Check out more details at http://tiny.cc/0lf46

 

Does this take into consideration feature insertions such as "news results," "shopping results," or "image/video results" for the search term which then push organics farther down the page?

 

Those numbers are a few years old now but probably still somewhat accurate. Google for example moved their PPC closer to the left side of the page to get a higher click through rate. I'm sure this took away from the percentages a little bit but probably not too much.

 

That sounds about right.

 

@ smindsrt: True! these figures are not from recent studies but during some discussions offline we came to the conclusion they shouldn't be changed very much lately. Only during this research google didn't showed any advertisement on the top hotspots. Currently above organic results in Google.

As Google stated during my GAP partner training (Google Advertising Professional) the spots above the organic results are a sort of gift to advertisement that is considered as very... very related to the search query. There is no optimization for these spot possible, beside your Adrank, quality score, CPC and CTR needs to be of upmost quality. But for sure it has something to do with boosting the CTR/income on the ads as benefit for Google.

@LongCall911 The figures are only for Google search. For sure you can find interesting heatmaps / eye tracking charts for the Google specific services you mentioned. In most research / studies i have read the standard pattern people use during search looks very much the same as a F pattern.
Google Search users
first look top left
go to top right. (top ads)..
go back to top left...
go down to lower organic results ...
go to middle right (ads #4/5) ..
go back to organic results 6-10.

This is mainly for Google search results, for any other site it depends very much on the design an usuability aspects of the website. There is software which can make a heatmap or eye tracking analysis for your website if you interested.