Google Traffic Pie Graph

[derekjay]

I thought this was quite interesting - it shows the click distribution (average of course) of various results from first position, to second page. Certainly emphasizes the importance of being on the first page of Google!



Note that this pie is only for organic results. Paid results (Adwords) are excluded here.

[Dave A]

It also says something about how good Google is at sorting and delivering relevant results!

Here's another thought.

Google webmaster tools gives some really great stats on search queries nowadays. If you use the data on your CTR and average position for any particular search phrase and compare it to this pie chart, you've got a pretty good idea as to how well your organic "advert" is performing.

A few days ago I was reading in a thread on TFSA a debate on how important the page title meta is. I didn't have time to respond, but I certainly thought to myself "Guys, you're missing the point here! Getting a high listing is only half the battle."

Your page title and description metas are critical if you hope to have above-average performance for your organic search position. And of course, if your CTR performance is better than those listed above you, your listing can only head up the organic list

[OnlineMarketing]

I thought this was quite interesting - it shows the click distribution (average of course) of various results from first position, to second page. Certainly emphasizes the importance of being on the first page of Google!

Nice pie chart Derek. That breakdown reflects the AOL stats leakage of several years ago and is definitely a good starting point to understanding the distribution curve of clicks however it does predate the presence of adwords,google places and various other changes in the serps, the general range of adwords take of the pie seems to be 15-25% depending on the niche(that's 15-25% of all clicks are shared between adwords advertisers). We did a survey of 10 of our sites that rank number 1 for their main keywords and divided it by the exact match figure given by the google keyword tool(the industry's best guess of traffic for specific phrases) and our figure came to 63%. this tells me a few things:
1. Google keyword tool is only a guess of total traffic though the recent upgrade(there were plenty of law suits looming) seems to have tightened it up a lot.(Sadly in my case i had 2 domains that were showing projected exact match traffic of 12000 and 18000 per month after the upgrade it shows 850 and 1300! ) This now makes it a very valuable tool as building in a tolerance you can rely on it at least being on the conservative i think rather than overstating.

2. Rankings 1 to 3 are now getting more of the pie. The AOL figures said 55% between the top 3, i think it is now 70-75%.

3. There seems to be a trend that being ranked in positions 9 and 10 is better than 6-8. The only reason i can think this is happening is that a proportion of people either click on a top ranking and then scroll to the bottom or some are scrolling to the bottom automatically.

4. AOL's stats said 10% goes to page 2, i'd say this is now less than 1%.

Your page title and description metas are critical if you hope to have above-average performance for your organic search position. And of course, if your CTR performance is better than those listed above you, your listing can only head up the organic list

Couldn't agree more, so many meta title's and descriptions are lame and uninspiring, a good copywriter would increase CTR's overnight. Of course building a 30 page site and writing all the meta titles and descriptions is a day's work in itself nevermind a site that has 1000's of indexed pages so it's all about time as is everything but considering once it's done it may bring you thousands of extra visitors by making the effort it should be done.