The recent updates to the Google Webmaster Tools Top Searches report have offered new data to SEOs on clickthrough rates from natural search positions.

There have been various posts recently looking at the accuracy of the data and on click through rates which I'd like to add to with a look at how different types of searchers interact with the SERPs.

The types of keyphrases I have chosen to look at are Brand, Intent and Research keyphrases.

Three Different Types of Searches

Brand are all those phrases looking for a specific website, including navigational phrases (like ACME and www.acme.com )

Intent I classed as those phrases that signalled intent to purchase - these are phrases that usually include "cheapest", "deals" or "compare" (like "compare blue widgets")

Research I classed as those phrases that were more general information queries with no intent to buy seen (like "what are blue widgets")

The data found that these queries do exhibit different click through rates and user behaviour.

Summary of Results

• Brand queries had a high click through at number 1, as expected, with number 1 taking 46% of clicks.
• Intent queries were lower, showing 31% clicking through to number one.
• Research queries showed an even higher clickthrough rate at number 1, getting 51% of click throughs, but also showing a higher clickthrough rate overall throughout the SERP

Organic Click Through Rate (CTR) Charts

Data was gathered from 630 keyphrases that had CTRs included within the Google Top Search reports.  Websites were a mix of ecommerce based websites varying in size and sectors.  Data and trendlines compiled in Excel2007.

A chart detailing the trend lines is shown below - Blue for Brand, Green for Research and Red for Intent.

(Click on charts for bigger version)

Log trendlines were used as they give the best R² values:

• Research - 0.55
• Intent -  0.75
• Brand - 0.76

Head terms verses Long tail keyphrases

The increased CTR for research phrases seems to hold for head and log tail terms - limiting to keyphrases of phrase length 3 or more produces:

Restricting to head terms of two or less keywords produces:

Overall average CTR and keyphrase length

Taking an average of all keyphrases in a keyword type:

Keyphrase length

• Brand - 1.96
• Inent - 3.14
• Research - 3.57

Click Through Rate - keyword type

• Brand - 25%
• Intent - 16%
• Research - 26%

Conclusions

Based on the above data...

Research keyphrases have an even greater clickthrough rate at the number one position than brand searches, with 51% of users clicking the top spot in the data gathered. However browsers in this mode are using more long tail phrases - typical length of keyphrase was 4.4  Click through rates were also generally higher throughout the SERP, with a user more likely to click on other results.

Users looking to buy seem more cautious clicking through from the SERPs, but still heavily favoured to the top results - CTR for #1 in this section was 31% dropping to 7% by postion #5.  These figures are in general agreement with the recent Chitika study and AOL click through data.

Brand searches are typically two keywords or less, and obviously heavily favoured to the top results.  If you are not ranking number one for your brand, you are losing a lot of traffic.

More info

Let me know in the comments any criticisims and other areas we could look at, if you blog about or use a similar approach to the above let me know via @GuavaUK or email mark.edmondson @ guava.com and I will link to it from this post.  Over time I hope to gather more data to make more accurate predicitions on other factors that may play into behavioual factors in search, such as bounce rates and page view depth.

Other posts looking into organic click through rates in the past include:
Redcardinal AOL data analysis
SEObook CTR post
SEO Scientist looks at Organic CTR and eyetracking studies
More on eyetracking studies