Click Probability or Click Share
Click probability or click share is primarily discussed in organic search (SEO) and in paid search (SEA). It concerns how many users percentage-wise click on the individual positions.
In this context, one must especially take the values with caution, as the search engine market or the search engines themselves are reorganized and reinvented daily. If yesterday the percentage click share on position 1 at Google was still averaging XY percent, that may not necessarily be the case today. If Google has changed its search results page (SERP) from yesterday to today in layout, significant shifts may have occurred.
The Search Intent and Click Share
The click share also depends on the search intent or the thing that a person has searched for. Let’s assume the search query is “Italian shoes”. Then the search intent can have the following backgrounds:
- “Italian Shoes” were searched for
- The Italian word for “shoes” (Scarpe) was searched
In the second case, the click share on positions 1 to 10 likely wasn’t very high, as these were probably just shopping results (“Where can I get Italian shoes?”). – Admittedly, an exotic case, and it doesn’t change the fact that the click share on position 1 remains the same. However, one must still keep in mind that such values should not always be viewed through the same lens.
The click probability thus evaluates how high the share of clicks on position n is compared to position x. This is good to know (especially if one keeps up to date here – monthly updates of the data are certainly sufficient).
And it quickly becomes clear that in the field of search engine marketing (especially in the topic cloud of conversions: purchases, downloads, recruiting, shopping …) rankings in positions 11 and worse will hardly bring any traffic at all.
Other factors that influence click-through rates
It is also not surprising that click probabilities are device-dependent. While there are not necessarily massive differences here, it is something to keep in mind.
Ultimately, there are also notable deviations. For example, the so-called Featured Snippet, despite being in the top position, has a lower probability of being clicked than the first organic position (as of November 2020; Position 1 = 28% and Featured Snippet 23%, thus a difference of 5 percentage points).
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