How Clickeable are your Organic Results?— CTR by Position
This post is a part of the Google Search Console Feature Engineering Series.
What is CTR?
First, a quick brush-up. CTR or Click-Through Rate tells you how clickeable your content is. It’s a ratio between the amount of times your content is shown vs. the amount of times it was clicked.
For example, if a page was displayed 10 times in a Google Search Result Page but was clicked only 5 times, it has a CTR of 50%.
What is CTR by Position?
CTR by Position is a Google Search Console Feature Engineered Metric that tells you the average Click-Through Rate per Position for your site. You can use it to forecast SEO traffic and sales.
Why is the CTR by Position Metric Relevant?
We all heard that a 1st place ranking in organic (non-paid) results gets more clicks than a 2nd place, right? Okay… how much more?
Google search result pages vary from niche to niche.
For instance, here’s a Google SERP for the search term “Hotels in Manhattan”
The first organic result is below the fold, i.e. it doesn’t appear until you scroll down. However, if you appear in 1st position for this query according to Google Search Console, your CTR isn’t going to be as high as a result that doesn’t have all that visual stimuli on top of the organic results — like the image below.
In the above example, the first thing on the page is an organic result. This would also appear in 1st position in Google Search Console if that was your site.
So the key question is: is the 1st organic rank the same for all niches? Of course not. Some industries have more flare in the result pages.
Generic CTR tables like Brian Dean’s are useful, but may not be showing a complete picture for your specific industry or niche.
How to Forecast SEO Traffic and Revenue with the CTR by Position Metric
Google Keyword Planner tells us how much average monthly search volume a keyword has.
If we want to target a new keyword that has, say, 100K monthly searches, we can use the following formula to know how much traffic a 1st rank for that keyword will bring us*:
[Monthly Keyword Searches] * [1st Position CTR]
Translated to our values, it’d look like this:
100,000 * [1st Position CTR =
Traffic is nice, but what about money? We can use Google Analytics to find out the average conversion rate and average ticket price from our organic traffic.
Let’s say that 0.15% of our organic traffic purchases an item and that the average item ticket is at $153.75.
We can use the following formula to know how much revenue a 1st place position for our 100K monthly search volume keyword would generate:
[Monthly Keyword Searches] * [1st Position CTR] * [Organic Conversion Rate] * [Organic Average Ticket Price]
Translated to our sample values, it would be:
100,000 * [1st Position CTR] * 0.15% * $153.75 = $
*you can replace the 1st position CTR for whatever position you want.
Conclusion
The CTR by Position metric can be extracted from GSC and used to make Organic Traffic and revenue projections specifically tailored to your website.
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Happy rankings!
