Google consistently changes search features as a way to improve user satisfaction. For search marketers, we wonder how those search features affect user’s organic click-through rate behavior.
In this episode of the award-winning Here’s Why digital marketing video series, Eric Enge reveals insights from his first-ever public study on Google SERP features and click-through rates.
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Resources
- How Organic Search CTR Is Impacted By Google’s Search Features
- See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
Transcript
We recently partnered with AuthorityLabs to track 2 million queries on a daily basis for 30 days. AuthorityLabs also provided us with clickstream data for that same 30 days. What this has allowed us to do is share more insight than ever before on user behavior in the search results, and how this is impacted by Google’s search features. As part of this, we track many types of search features including ads, brand results showing sitelinks, featured snippets, image carousels, job listings, knowledge panels, local packs, news results, “people also ask” boxes, related searches, shopping results, video carousels, and more.
But first, let’s look at aggregate data on click-through rate on desktop versus mobile. Notice how the paid search click-through rate is about four and a half percent in both environments. But the no-click search volume is much higher in mobile, making organic click-through rate only about 40% in the mobile environment.
As part of our analysis, we actually took a look into how popular the various certain features were through our entire data set of 2 million queries. That’s what I’m showing you in the chart right now. One of the interesting findings, for example, is how popular video carousels are – and for that matter, “people also ask” boxes and related search features are extremely popular.
In addition, we built an aggregate click-through rate model for non-branded versus branded search queries, as I’m showing you in the chart right now. If you look at this data, what you’ll see is this huge gap, where on brand queries the click-through rate is far, far higher. For example, on those branded queries, we’re seeing a click-through rate in position one of nearly 70%. But on non-branded queries, it’s only about 20%. That’s a huge gap.
Another major finding is that the results with featured snippets tend to get more clicks than results with no featured snippets. That total, by the way, does include the clicks on the featured snippet itself.
If you want more of the data that I’ve shared with you in this video, check out the full study here. You’ll get more of our findings that we’ve spread across a whole array of the various search features to show you the impact they have on overall click-through rate.
Don’t miss a single episode of Here’s Why. Click the subscribe button below to be notified via email each time a new video is published.
See all of our Here’s Why Videos | Subscribe to our YouTube Channel
