• Does web page performance matter for ranking in Google organic search?
• Which of the Core Web Vitals metrics correlate with first page search engine rankings?

In March 2022, Google announced that the page experience update for Desktop has been fully rolled out so we thought it would be interesting to see its impact compared to the Mobile update that happened in May 2021.

With the help of our free tool Wattspeed, we uncovered some interesting findings that I’m about to share with you today.

Summary of Our Most Interesting Findings

1. The higher the ranking in Google, the lower the LCP metric is.
2. 39% of analyzed web pages passed the Core Web Vitals metrics, while the other 61% were below the threshold.
3. 80% of the pages that pass Core Web Vitals on Desktop also pass them on Mobile.
4. The Core Web Vitals is a ranking factor, but it’s not as important as links, content, or search intent.

The above data is based on more than 3 million pages analyzed by this study. Read on to find out all the details about each of our findings.

You can also check out the entire Core Web Vitals Study on the Wattspeed website.

What are Core Web Vitals?

The Core Web Vitals, or CWV in short, is a set of metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a web page.

They are a subset of the page experience signals, which measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page.  

The data that Google uses to rank websites in organic search comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) which is a public dataset of real user experience data on millions of websites.

It measures three Core Web Vitals metrics:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

These metrics focus on three aspects of the user experience: loading, interactivity, and visual stability:

In May 2021, page experience for mobile devices became a ranking signal. Almost a year later, in March 2022, Google announced that the page experience update for Desktop has been fully rolled out.

For more news about Google updates that affect search and rankings, I recommend you watch the amazing Google Search News channel. Here’s a link to the latest episode in which John talks about this latest update, which rolled out in March 2022.

This Desktop update includes all the current signals of the mobile version of the page experience update, except the mobile-friendliness part:

Google has also compiled a set of answers for anyone who has questions about these metrics in this comprehensive Core Web Vitals FAQ.

How Many Sites pass the Core Web Vitals metrics?

We analyzed around 3 million web pages and found that for both mobile and desktop pages, about 39% passed the Core Web Vitals metrics, while the other 61% were below the threshold.

What is interesting though is that the percentage of the websites that pass the CWV is higher for the highest ranking positions in Google organic search.

The CrUX report does not show CWV scores for pages that have not met minimum traffic thresholds. Thus we found a lot of pages in Google’s top 10 results that did not have any CrUX data associated with them.

Are the Core Web Vitals correlated with the ranking position in Google search results?

It is important to start by saying that some of the studies that we do in the SEO industry try to correlate certain factors with the actual Google rankings. However, most of the time, “correlation is not causation”, which means that just because two things correlate does not necessarily mean that one causes the other. So take the data below with a grain of salt and don’t jump to conclusions immediately.

That being said, there are some interesting charts below, so let’s dive right in.

Let’s look at each of the three Core Web Vitals and see if there is any correlation between them and ranking in organic google search:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading performance. For a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds since the page first starts loading.

It looks like none of the 3 million pages that were part of this study (which were found in the top 20 results of Google) have an average LCP lower than 2.5 seconds:

However, what is interesting, is that the charts above clearly show that, the higher the ranking in Google, the lower the LCP metric is.

First Input Delay (FID): measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

The good news is that all the pages that we tested (which are also in the top 20 results) have an FID that is less than 100 ms. However, the difference in FID values between the Top 20 rankings isn’t that great and there is no clear correlation between FID and ranking positions:

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1 or less. There is a slight visual trend here that shows rankings in top positions have a lower CLS, but the difference between the CLS values isn’t that great to justify a clear correlation.

Core Web Vitals by Industry

Not all web pages are created equal. Most of them use different technologies and they also have different features. For this reason, the Core Web Vitals metrics differ a lot for different pages.

When looking at the average results of the entire set of 3 million web pages that were analyzed in this study, it’s hard to get the whole story. So we decided to break down the entire set of pages by industry, to see how these pages perform with regard to Core Web Vitals for each industry.

Here’s the percentage of pages that pass the Core Web Vitals on Desktop broken down by industry:

And here’s the percentage of pages that pass the Core Web Vitals on Mobile broken down by industry:

The “Arts & Entertainment” section seems interesting because 74% of the pages that belong to this industry pass the Core Web Vitals on Mobile, but only 23% of these pages pass the Core Web Vitals on Desktop.

This is probably due to the fact that on Desktop, especially in the “Arts & Entertainment” industry, most pages display videos that take a longer time to load. On mobile, the same pages might scale down this video to an image instead.

When we look at each Core Web Vital metric separately, we can see that the LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) is the metric that most of these pages fail at:

And if we look at the LCP metric broken down by search result type, we can see that Video is the one responsible for the largest LCP score for most websites:

Check out the entire Core Web Vitals Study on the Wattspeed website for more detailed charts of Core Web Vitals broken down by industry, device and search result type.

Are the Core Web Vitals a major ranking signal?

The short answer is no. However, they become important when competing pages in search score well for all the other important factors. Read below for the long answer.

Page experience and Core Web Vitals are just some of the many factors that affect how Google ranks web pages in organic search. Some of them are more important than others and the formula was not made public.

John Mueller, Search Advocate at Google, while talking about the May 2021 update said that, even though these performance factors will be used for ranking, they will not catapult your website from page ten to number one position. And that content relevance is more important than Core Web Vitals scores:

John Mueller

Search Advocate at Google

So just because your website is faster with regards to Core Web Vitals than some competitors doesn’t necessarily mean that come May you will jump to position number one in the search results.

We still require that relevance is something that should be kind of available on the site. It should make sense for us to show the site in the search results because, as you can imagine, a really fast website might be one that’s completely empty. But that’s not very useful for users.

It’s useful to keep that in mind when it comes to Core Web Vitals. It is something that users notice. It is something that we will start using for ranking. But it’s not going to change everything completely.

John Mueller, Google SEO office-hours – Feb 26, 2021

Some people from Reddit were skeptical about Core Web Vitals and their power over how Google ranks web pages in organic search results:

“Anyone else not buying Core Web Vitals? I just find it hard to believe that this actually becomes a greater part of the ranking algo. Has anyone seen dramatic gains or decreases based on it so far?“

“If two pieces of content are equally high quality and relevant to the search term and all the other ranking factors are equal, but one site has better core web vitals, it will rank higher.

I imagine it’s quite rare for two articles to be equal on all other factors so I think that’s why we don’t see much impact from it.”

And here’s the answer from John Mueller:

John Mueller

Search Advocate at Google

It is a ranking factor, and it’s more than a tie-breaker, but it also doesn’t replace relevance.

Depending on the sites you work on, you might notice it more, or you might notice it less. As an SEO, a part of your role is to take all of the possible optimizations and figure out which ones are worth spending time on. Any SEO tool will spit out 10s or 100s of “recommendations”, most of those are going to be irrelevant to your site’s visibility in search. Finding the items that make sense to work on takes experience.

The other thing to keep in mind with core web vitals is that it’s more than a random ranking factor, it’s also something that affects your site’s usability after it ranks (when people actually visit). If you get more traffic (from other SEO efforts) and your conversion rate is low, that traffic is not going to be as useful as when you have a higher conversion rate (assuming UX/speed affects your conversion rate, which it usually does). CWV is a great way of recognizing and quantifying common user annoyances.

Page experience is just one of many signals that are used to rank pages. Keep in mind that intent of the search query is still a very strong signal, so a page with a subpar page experience may still rank highly if it has great, relevant content.

John Mueller, Reddit

Are the Core Web Vitals scored for each URL or the entire website?

The Core Web Vitals scores are assessed for each individual page, and it is very clear in our study results that some pages are above and others below these thresholds.

Is CWV a pass/fail score?

As you can see in the images above, Google Search Console shows three states for Core Web Vitals: poor, needs improvement, and good. This is a clear indication that pages either pass (good) or fail (poor or need improvement). PageSpeed Insights also indicates that pages either pass or do not pass so a safe bet is that Core Web Vitals is a pass or fail score.

How can I check the Core Web Vitals for my own pages?

PageSpeed Insights

If you’re curious to see the CWV scores for your own pages, the quickest way is to use PageSpeed Insights. Just enter your URL and you can see the results for both Desktop and Mobile.

Wattspeed

If you’re not looking for a one-time check, but rather to monitor your Core Web Vitals in time, take a look at Wattspeed. It’s a free tool that provides multiple page speed metrics and their evolution in time. You also get in-depth information about what the problem is and how you can improve your scores. You can then set up alerts that notify you every time your scores reach a certain threshold.

One interesting aspect of Wattspeed is that it lets you compare two pages. This allows you to see how a single page evolved in time and what problems had been fixed. But it also allows you to compare your page with a competitor’s page to see why the page experience scores are different.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console has a dedicated section for Desktop in the Page Experience report. It tells you how many of your URLs pass or fail the Core Web Vitals and the total number of impressions you get from these URLs.

It’s important to remember though that Google Search Console data comes from the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX), which does not show CWV scores for pages that have not met minimum traffic thresholds.

Conclusion

I’d like to thank the Wattspeed team for providing the raw data that made this study possible.

Now it’s time to hear what you think.

Were any of these findings surprising? Have you seen any significant position shifts after the Desktop rollout?

Tweet me and let me know your thoughts.

Find out below how popular this Visual Stories feature is in the Google search results and how you can track your own keywords that show up for this feature with AWR.

Here’s a quick peek at what the new Web Stories SERP feature looks like in Advanced Web Ranking:

Here you can see that the Web Stories feature appears on both keywords, but the selected website actually ranks within one of the Web Stories for the keyword “seo tool”, because it is shown in green color.

When you click on this icon, you will be presented with the Top Sites report, in which you can see all the Web Stories that appear in the SERP along with some useful information about their position and how far along they are displayed in the results:

For even more detailed information, click on the “View SERP” button at the top, which will show how many Web Stories were actually found in the SERP, where they are located and what they look like:

How do I find out which keywords have Visual Stories in Google search results?

To find out which of your keywords show the new Visual Stories feature, just go to Ranking -> Keywords in Advanced Web Ranking and add a SERP Features filter that includes Web Stories:

This will show you all the keywords that have Web Stories in their Google search results.

To see just the keywords that you rank for with a Web Story, select your website in the filter above.

How popular is the Visual Stories feature in Google search results?

Currently, the new Visual Stories feature appears only in mobile search results in the US. There have been some significant amounts of testing in India and Canada, so you should expect to see Web Stories appear in the Google search results in more countries in the future.

Our Google Organic CTR Study, which looks at data from Google Search Console for millions of keywords shows that this feature is currently not very popular in Google search results. Less than 1% of searches in our study show this feature:

The average CTR for the Web Stories results is also pretty low, at around 4%. This is probably because the average position in which Web Stories appear in the Google search results is around position 6, which is well below the fold for most mobile devices.

From what I’ve seen, most of the Web Stories results show up more than 2,000 pixels down the page, so there needs to be a significant amount of scrolling involved to reach them.

That does not mean that Google will not change things in the future, making this feature appear more prominently and in higher positions. We’ll monitor things for you so you can always be on top of your search results. Keep an eye on our free SEO tools for more information.

Now it’s time to hear what you think.

Were any of these findings surprising? Or maybe you have a question?

Either way, write me on Twitter and let me know your thoughts.

If you find any value at all in us making it as a standalone article – please let us know by either dropping a quick comment or giving this post a share. Thank you.

The question of how organic clickthrough rate is evolving with Google’s continuously improving search results came up almost a decade ago and is still left unanswered.

Ten years ago, when only 10 blue links were shown, we would mostly rely on the “F” reading pattern to explain the users’ preference for the first listings in search results. Nowadays Google is mixing the SERPs with dozens of distracting elements like images, video, news, carousels, entities and so on. That is one of the reasons why, in 2014, it is close to impossible to predict what will catch the reader’s eye on a search results page.

In this study we’ve looked at how different types of search results influence users’ behaviour and what role does user intent play in determining the distribution of clicks.

The study is based on data collected from Google Webmaster Tools for the month of July, 2014. We have analyzed a total of 465.000 keywords across 5.000 websites.

1. The evolution of Google’s search results
2. What influences CTR?
3. Previous CTR Studies
4. Our Methodology
5. The CTR Study
   • Desktop vs. Mobile
   • Ads
   • Branded vs. Unbranded
   • Search Intent
   • Long tail
6. Google CTR History
7. Glossary of Terms
8. Acknowledgements

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

1. The Evolution of Google Search Results

Back in 1998, Google began with a very simplistic approach to the search results: ten blue links.

Since most of us read from left to right and from top to bottom, is it easy to realize that this minimalistic layout resulted in a very high CTR for the first organic search results.

Somewhere in the second part of the year 2000, the first ads appeared. At that time ads were placed on the right side of the organic search results and they were clearly marked with a yellow background.

Later, Google realized that their users needed to search through more than just websites. Therefore, in 2001 the Image search has been introduced, and with it, the revolution of the SERPs has started.

Then, in 2007, Google introduced Universal Search, which included all the new data that Google has been crawling for the previous 5 years: news, videos, books, products, stock quotes, blogs, weather, flights, sport scores and patents.

But with all this information blended into the list of results, Google had to find a way to predict the type of content that the searcher might be seeking and figure out a way to show all this information in a relevant way.

Nowadays, Google even strives to provide the answers directly into the SERPs, rather than listing the sites that may answer our questions.

Since millions of sites depend upon Google for attracting potential customers, the potential impact of these changes to online business, as a whole, is huge.

2. What Influences CTR?

Organic click through rate is one of the best metrics to measure online businesses’ performance in SERPs and to illustrate the users’ search behaviour.

In addition to the well-known tweaks marketers make to influence organic CTR (titles, meta descriptions, snippets, calls to action etc.), today there are several other elements, out-of-a-marketer’s-control, that alter organic CTR.

In this study, we wanted to focus on some of these factors and their impact on organic CTR to provide marketers with actual data to base their predictions on.

2.1. The everchanging Google results

Other than the constant shifts in Google’s UI, search results are dramatically changing in complex ways. Because nowadays users are no longer using “keywords” for search, but they are entering complex queries and questions, Google too had to evolve, up to the point where it actually tries to come up with answers rather than just results.

Trying to meet the users’ intent based queries, Google now serves richer, more relevant answers:

• Knowledge graph “instant results” for people, places and things.
• Product listings / shopping for buying signals.
• Dictionary results for “definition-based” queries

However, the downside is that, as a result, lots of these queries no longer need to result in a click. One of our goals in this study was to find out the current amplitude of such abandoned searches.

2.2. Ads

We know that with each search query, a decent share of clicks is accounted to the sponsored results, but not all ads are created equal.

With more than a decade since the launch of Google AdWords, paid listings have also evolved, being now displayed at the top, bottom or right side of organic listings.

Does the appearance of each type of paid listings influence the users’ organic click behaviour? This is also something that we wanted to find out with this study.

2.3. User intent

Since at the heart of every google search is a need, the content earning the click in search results is the one who succeeds in meeting that particular need.

Meaning that the user’s preference for one search listing or another greatly depends on the search intent:

Navigational queries (where you need to go)

The intent here is to reach a particular site.

Navigational queries amount to around 10% of web queries, the reason for this type of queries being that it might be more convenient to use the search bar than typing the URL or when the user simply doesn’t know the website he is looking for.

For this kind of searches the “right” answer is usually unique and listed among the first few search results.

Informational queries (what you need to know)

The intent here is to acquire information assumed to be present on one or more web pages.

This type of queries constitute the majority of web searches (80%), typically articles, forums, blogs and topic-specific directories being sought by information seekers.

Transactional queries (what you need to do)

The intent here is to perform a web-mediated activity.

Online shopping, forms, registrations, downloads or any time a user needs to interact with a page, constitute transactional search queries (around 10% of web queries).

But how willing are users to seek for the right website among all search results depending on their search intent? Or how elaborated is the enunciation of their search query for a particular intent? And how does this reflect on the relevancy of the results retrieved, and eventually on organic CTR?

These are all questions we are trying to find the answer to with this study.

2.4. User device

The particularities of users’ behaviour on mobile devices are inevitably being cast forth, influencing the users’ mobile search habits as well. We suspected that this would translate into a different organic CTR pattern across the mobile search results pages.

The hypothesis was sustained by a number of previously researched figures:

• According to Google, users regularly search on mobile during the buying process – 74% searched on mobile using a search engine, while 48% started the research on search engines.
• A sense of urgency is also defining for the mobile buying intent – 55% of consumers using mobile for research want to purchase within an hour, 83% want to purchase within a day.
• Smartphone users typically use their device when they are on the go (68% according to the xAdtelemetrics Mobile Path to Purchase Study), the car being the most popular on the go location for mobile searches.
• Location proximity also matters to mobile searchers – 69% of users expect business to be within 5 miles or less of their location.

We also wanted to see the impact that the mobile search user interface has on organic CTR, with significantly fewer search items displayed above the fold on mobile devices.

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

3. Previous CTR Studies

The first real chance that search marketers had to examine click-through rates on organic search results came after AOL released 20 million search queries made by more than a half-million users in 2006.

A number of studies followed after that, including those from Enquiro (now Mediative) in 2007 and later by Chitika and Optify in 2010. More recent studies have been performed by Slingshot and Catalyst in 2011 and 2013 respectively.

Here is a comparison of the Click Through Rate for each study:

It’s important to emphasize the major differences in the methodologies applied for each study, as they are the main ingredients responsible for the dissimilarity of the results:

It’s worth noting that the studies conducted by Mediative (former Enquiro) and Chitika, have been executed through unique methods that cannot be truly compared to any of the other studies. Mediative’s study relies on survey data and eye-tracking research, while Chitika’s studies are based on ad impressions served within their network.

Also relevant for a comparison is how CTR is defined for the other three studies previously conducted:

• Optify defines CTR as “the percentage of users that clicked on each position, given that a user clicks on a top 20 organic ranking”. Their study makes the assumption that all searches result in a top 20 organic click.
• In the Slingshot SEO study, CTR is calculated as “total visits (via Google Analytics) divided by total searches (via Google AdWords Keyword Tool) for a given keyword over a stable period”.
• For the Catalyst study, CTR is defined as “the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click for a website (via Google Webmaster Tools)”.

The current study retrieves the CTR data from Google Webmaster Tools so comparing it with the Catalyst study would be the most accurate.

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

4. Our Methodology

Here’s how we obtained this data in case you want to do the same analysis for your own websites:

4.1. Download average search query data from GWT

The initial data was obtained from GWT with the default filter: Web. This includes only traffic coming from non mobile devices. Our average data set includes only keywords that have at least 50 impressions per month.

We then changed this filter to Mobile filter and downloaded the table again to get mobile data.

The Avg. position column displays an average of all ranking positions that this keyword has appeared in. This data was used to build the average charts.

4.2. Download exact search query data from GWT

When you click on a keyword in the Search Queries table, you will go to a report called Query Details. This report provides the CTR for each exact ranking position.

For example we can see here that for all searches when this keyword was ranked first, the CTR was 56%. That’s because 2,947 people searched for it (Impressions) but only 1,644 people actually clicked on it (Clicks).

4.3. Exclude from exact data the queries with less than 500 impressions per month

This was done to ensure that we get accurate results for CTR. We also included only those keywords that had at least 10 impressions for each position they appeared in.

4.4. Categorise queries based on brand, search intent and number of words

We wanted to see how the CTR changes for people looking for branded keywords. Most brands rank first for their brand keywords and it is believed that people tend to click on that first result.

For this study we have defined brand searches as searches that contain the entire domain name of the website in the query, with all the spaces and dashes removed.

The same thing happens when people include a search intent in their query. It is believed that people act differently when they are interested to buy something as opposed to looking for something or comparing different things.

How can we figure this out? We look for certain words in the search queries, trying to guess what the intent was for that search.

There are three types of search intents included in this study:

Informational

This includes searches that contain words like: what, when, where, how, who, restaurant, hotel, flight, definition, define, review, news, weather, time, phone.

Commercial

This includes searches that contain words like: buy, purchase, order, shop, coupon, cheap, cheapest, expensive, pricing.

Location

This includes searches that contain words like: near, nearby, from, directions, how long to, how far away from, how fast, train station, airport, ferry, route, highway, toll, plane tickets, flights, maps, driving directions.

We have also tracked long tail queries (more than one word) separately to see if that affects the CTR.

4.5. Find out if the SERP contains Ads

We matched the entire set of keywords from Google Webmaster Tools with the ones we track for each client in AWR Cloud. This way we were able to get more information about the features included in the SERP, such as whether there were ads, the number of ads and their position, and if any Universal features were included in the search results.

4.6. Create graphs for easier data analysis

We first used Excel to display this data in charts but in the end we ended up creating an in house tool because we realized that it would be interesting to see how the CTR changes over time.

Assumptions and Limitations

These days, with “not provided” being almost 100%, it’s almost impossible to measure how many people reach your website searching for a certain keyword. In this study, we made the assumption that the data collected from GWT with the above methodology is accurate.

The sample data set that was extracted from GWT belongs to our clients. Their businesses, although variate, may belong to certain industries that are different than the industry you are in. Therefore the results may not be the same for every business.

This study measures the CTR that was observed for a special time frame (within the month of July 2014). That means we cannot predict how the CTR changes for keywords that have higher volumes in different periods of the year.

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

5. The CTR Study

This is the reference chart for the click-through rate (CTR) of organic desktop searches in Google for July, 2014.

It is important to mention that these numbers reflect the CTR across all the searches included in this study. They do not account for the user intent, the features that appear in the SERP, or whether the keywords used in the search included a brand name. We will address these later in the study when we segment the data.

On average, 71.33% of searches result in an organic click on the first page. Page two and three get only 5.59% of the clicks. On the first page alone, the first 5 results account for 67.60% of all the clicks and the results from 6 to 10 account for only 3.73%

These numbers serve as a useful reminder of the importance of organic rankings, and reconfirms the importance of the top few positions on Google. Although the first spot is still the most valuable for CTR, it seems to have become less so. I’d guess that part of the reason is that the increased use of ads, universal search results and Google’s own comparison and shopping results have reduced the prominence of top slot.

Graham Charlton – Econsultancy

In case you wonder where the other 23.08% of the clicks are, here are some possible scenarios:

• Some people may find the Ads displayed above the organic results more relevant.
• Some people may not find what they are looking for in the first 10 results so they click on results from the second or third page instead.
• Others may not find what they are looking for at all so they refine the search adding more words to the query to be more explicit.
• With Google providing more and more instant answers people may very well find the answer to what they are looking for in the displayed search results so there is no need for them to click on any of the results

5.1. Desktop vs. Mobile

Mobile traffic is getting bigger and bigger day by day. Here we can see the CTR for searches coming from mobile devices compared with the searches from desktop devices. Given the fact that you can see fewer ranking results above the fold on mobile, people have assumed that the CTR would be higher for the first results on mobile devices. Let’s see if that is the case:

Not only is the CTR slightly lower on the first page, but the CTR for mobile searches actually rises on the 2nd and 3rd page, which is opposite to what we would expect and see from mobile searches.

I would’ve expected mobile to drop off much, much faster than desktop. These rates seem to imply that the first positions on a mobile results page are less significant than we thought. Does that mean people are scrolling more?

Ian Lurie – Portent

However, if we segment this data to include only searches from US, we can see a big difference between Desktop and Mobile for the results above the fold:

This variation in CTR could be due to specific queries which Google will have much more accurate US data for, but may also be due to changes in SERPs displays in US which are tested and rolled out long before international results.

Alan Ng – Branded 3

5.2. Ads

Back when Google started in 1998, there were only 10 blue links in the search results. Nowadays, the organic results are surrounded with ads. Some of them are more visible (the ones at the top and right side) and some of them are less visible (the ones at the bottom of the page).

Some of the ads are made just of text. Some of them show colorful images of products instead. They all affect the CTR on organic results. Let’s see how much.

Ads can cut the clickthrough rate on the first result nearly in half, which is huge, while other positions are far less impacted.

Danny Sullivan – Search Engine Land

Location of Ads

How does the location of ads impact CTR? We’ve analyzed the search results that had ads at the top of the page, on the right side and at the bottom of the page.

The pages that have ads at the top (red line) may also have ads on the right side or at the bottom. For those that have ads on the right side (orange line), we made sure there were no ads at the top, but they may have ads at the bottom. The pages with ads at the bottom (blue line) were selected to have no ads at the top or on the right side .

There is no surprise here. Ads in the top positions seem to hurt organic CTR more than ads on the right. But it’s interesting to see that the right side ads and the bottom page ads appear to have a positive influence over the organic CTR.

Number of Ads

We’ve also analyzed the search results that had only one, two or all three ads at the top of the page, to see which one is affecting the CTR more.

It’s not a surprise for anyone to see searches with multiple ads reduce organic CTR as they drive the organic results further down the page. It’s interesting however to see that searches with just one ad seem to produce a higher CTR for the first organic result than searches with no ads at all.

I’d guess seeing just one ad with the yellow ad symbol may make the organic result seem more natural and trustworthy, and would therefore lift CTR above that of results showing no ads, while the addition of a further one or two ads reduces this effect by driving organic results down the page, or forcing users to scroll and see other results.

Graham Charlton – Econsultancy

Certain search results, show an ad and an answer box before the organic results. One example is when you search for ‘dropbox max file size’. The answer box that shows up could be a possible explanation for this anomaly.

Tom Anthony – Distilled

CTR of Ads

It could be useful to see how the CTR of ads change with respect to their position. Because this study only focuses on organic CTR data, we asked our friends at WordStream to give us some insights into the CTR of paid listings.

On average, 17.2% of the clicks on desktop searches are attributed to ads, with the top 3 ads accounting for 11.69% of clicks.

It’s interesting that for searches on tablet devices, the ads seem to have a higher CTR than for desktop searches.

5.3. Branded vs. Unbranded

One might assume that when users are making generic searches on Google, they end up making a brand selection from the results retrieved. They choose from the handful of options received, the source of information or provider to trust in for satisfying their need.

But what happens when branded queries are made? If the users are clearly looking for information related to a specific brand, will they follow the same behavioral pattern as for generic searches?

For this study we have defined brand searches as searches that contain the entire domain name of the website in the query, with all the spaces and dashes removed.

For branded searches the first result is almost always associated with the brand’s website, which makes it the obvious choice for most users and very hard to miss. This would justify the big CTR difference between the first position and the rest of the SERP.

This big difference in CTR may also be affected by the fact that brand searches usually display a pack of 6 site links just below the first result, making it more prominent in the search results.

People will seek click on a brand in the first position for a search on that brand way out of proportion to all other positions.

Danny Sullivan – Search Engine Land

The CTR data coming straight from Google suggests that we should be even more conservative when estimating potential search traffic. Most of our keyword research is going to revolve around non-branded terms. If you study the data, you’ll see a dramatic difference between CTR for the #1 position of branded vs. non-branded search.

Our views of how many clicks you will get with an average position of 1 may be skewed because of this. But now with this segmentation data, I know I will be viewing traffic potential even more conservatively based upon CTR of only non-branded keywords.

Dan Shure – Evolving SEO

5.4. Search Intent

Most of us have some sort of intent when we search for something. We may need to find the location of a restaurant or a better price for that big TV we always wanted to get for the living room.

It is believed that people who search for keywords with high commercial intent (“buy 4k LCD TV”) are more likely to click on the first results than people who perform basic informational searches (“where is the nearest thai restaurant”).

Let’s see if search intent does indeed affect how people click on the results.

This chart reveals that people tend to click more on the first results when their search has some kind of intent. So we wanted to dig deeper and see which of the search intents affect the CTR and how.

The “Specific Intent” in the chart above is the set of all keywords found in the Informational, Commercial and Location sections and the “Other Intent” means all the other keywords.

Certain search results show both an ad and an answer box before the organic results – one example is a search for ‘dropbox max file size’. The answer box that shows up matches the 1st place listing and could be a possible explanation for this anomaly.

Tom Anthony – Distilled

Google is getting better and better at figuring out search intent. Nowadays, many of the search results contain instant answers so people no longer need to click on a website to find out what they’re looking for. The answer is already there.

Commercial intent searches usually trigger ads that have colorful pictures of the products we search. It’s usually a lot more tempting to click on these pictures than on the first organic results.

The following chart compares these three search intents and how they affect the CTR:

It’s interesting that commercial intent searches have a lower organic CTR than informational searches. We’ve seen the opposite hold true for paid CTRs. This may be because commercial intent KWs are more likely to trigger ads, which lower the organic CTR.

Mark Irvine – WordStream

Search results for commercial intent keywords usually contain more features (eg: pricing, ratings, shopping results) which might dilute the CTR across the page.

Richard Baxter – Builtvisible

5.5. Long tail

Did you know that according to Google search volume data, 33,100 people are searching for “coffee beans” each month? While it would be hard for anyone to guess what they are really interested to find, the intent behind the long tail query “where to buy green coffee beans” is pretty obvious.

Therefore the popular belief that since long tail keywords are more descriptive, people tend to click more on the first results when searching for them. But is it really so?

The collected data shows that the longer the query, the higher the organic CTR is for all SERPs, except for the first position. This might be because of the big CTR we have seen for branded searches in the first position.

Below is the same chart as above but with desktop search data from US only:

Interestingly, for one word queries in the US, the first position gets the highest CTR, almost double the number of clicks than for the other types of queries. Do most brands in US have their name made of just one word?

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

Estimating Organic Traffic Based on CTR

Knowing the CTR for each position in the organic search, it would be valuable to see how to use this data to calculate the organic traffic potential of your website.

Depending on the ranking you have for a keyword and how many people click on your website, you can easily calculate how many people would reach your website from organic search.

But things get a little complicated when taking into account that each keyword is different.

As this study showed, searches for branded keywords have a higher CTR. Ads displayed above the organic results determine the CTR to drop significantly for the 1st position.

Search intent also affects organic CTR significantly and long tail keywords searches show higher CTRs for first page listings.

Theoretically, by taking into account all these factors, you could easily estimate the amount of organic traffic you would be driving. The formula is quite simple:

• Let’s see an example for an unbranded keyword with a volume of 1,000 searches per month where you rank first in the organic results with no ads above you:

• Now, suppose there are ads displayed above the organic results. In this case the CTR drops from 24.8 % to 16.9 %:

Applying this formula for each keyword, enables you to estimate the amount of organic search traffic for any website. However, when using this formula, please keep in mind the differences between the Impressions metric from GWT and keyword search volume.

If your website appears on the third page of search results and the user performing the search does not get past the first page of results, it does not count as an impression for the term searched for. In contrast, a term’s search volume indicates the approximate number of times a term was searched for over a specific time period.

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

6. Google CTR History

Each year new CTR studies are conducted and, as seen, the results vary enough from one year to another to justify the startling reactions of online marketers. This lead us into the decision of taking the study one step further this year, and transform the initial CTR study into a free tool.

The tool is especially useful for evaluating trends or determining the CTR changes on particular time periods such as the holiday season. It can be accessed for free on our website and allows you to see how organic click-through rates change over time, in relation to all the factors investigated throughout the study.

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

7. Glossary of Terms

CTR (Click Through Rate) – The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click for a website. (via Google Webmaster Tools)

Impressions – The number of times pages from a website appeared in search results. (via Google Webmaster Tools)

Clicks – The number of times a user clicked a website’s listing in search results for a particular query. (via Google Webmaster Tools)

Average Position – The average top position of a website on the search results page for that query. To calculate average position, Google takes into account the top ranking URL from the website for a particular query. For example, if Jane’s query returns your site as the #1 and #2 result, and David’s query returns your site in positions #2 and #7, your average top position would be 1.5. (via Google Webmaster Tools)

Exact Position – Exact position shows how often a website appeared in a specific position in search results. For example, if Position 1 has 36 impressions, it means that there were 36 searches for the query in which that particular website was the very first site listed in search results. (via Google Webmaster Tools)

Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – The listing of web pages returned by a search engine after a search query is made.

Organic Results – The listing of web pages in the query results that are not paid advertisements.

Searches With Ads – Search engine result pages that contain paid advertisement listings. Paid results may appear on a SERP at the top, bottom or right side of the page.

Searches Without Ads – Search engine result pages that do not contain any paid advertisement listings.

Searches With Top Ads – Search engine result pages that contain paid advertisement listings, displayed at the top of the page. These pages may also have ads on the right side or at the bottom.

Searches With Right Side Ads – Search engine result pages that contain paid advertisement listings, displayed at the right side. We made sure there were no ads at the top, but they may have ads at the bottom.

Searches With Bottom Ads – Search engine result pages that contain paid advertisement listings, displayed at the bottom of the page. The pages with ads at the bottom were selected to have no ads at the top or on the right side.

Above the Fold – The upper half of a SERP, visible without scrolling down the page. Typically, positions #1-5.

Below the Fold – The lower half of a SERP, visible by scrolling down the page. Typically, positions #6-10.

Branded Searches – A branded search is defined as the query containing a keyword that appears in the domain name.

Informational Intent – An informational intent is identified for queries containing words like: what, when, where, how, restaurant, hotel, flight, news, etc.

Commercial Intent – A commercial intent is identified for queries containing words like: buy, purchase, cheap, pricing, etc.

Location Intent – A location intent is identified for queries containing words like: near, nearby, from, directions, airport, route, maps, etc.

Query Length – The number of words composing the search query: one, two, three or four+ words

We publish fresh organic CTR data monthly.
Access the full CTR data. It’s free.

8. Acknowledgements

We would like to express our thanks to the following people for their contribution to this study:

Danny Sullivan

Danny is a founding Editor of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also serves as chief content officer for Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He can be found on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

Ian Lurie

Ian is the CEO and founder of Portent. He is the co-author of the Web Marketing All-In-One for Dummies. He writes regularly on the Portent Blog and has been published on AllThingsD, Forbes.com and TechCrunch. He can be found on Twitter as @portentint.

Richard Baxter

Founder and CEO of Builtvisible.com, an agency of people who love SEO, search & creating content that communicates ideas. You can get in touch with Richard on Twitter at @richardbaxter.

Mark Irvine

Mark is Director of Strategic Partnerships at Wordstream. He can be found on Twitter as @MarkIrvine89.

Dan Shure

Dan is the owner of Evolving SEO. He spoke at several industry events such as SMX East in New York where he shares his expertise with on-site technical SEO, WordPress, site architecture and content. He can be found on Twitter as @dan_shure.

Graham Charlton

Graham is the Editor in Chief at SaleCycle. He blogs about eCommerce, mobile commerce, email marketing and more. He can be found on Twitter as @gcharlton.

Tom Anthony

Tom is VP Product at Distilled, where he works on a variety of projects from internal tools to research studies for clients. He is also writing up his thesis for a PhD in Artificial Intelligence. He can be found on Twitter as @TomAnthonySEO.

Alan Ng

Alan is Associate Director of Digital Analytics at Edit Agency where he using his extensive mathematical knowledge and enthusiasm for search tools, Excel and refining processes. He can be found on Twitter as @_AlanNg.

A few months ago we revealed that we were working on a new version of Advanced Web Ranking and even allowed a limited-time access to the new version. Now we’re ready for the next step. So today we are excited to release the new AWR with some exciting new features and an improved UX.

Since you last saw the app we were busy gathering feedback from existing AWR users and new trials, which we’ve distilled into many small improvements and two major features: Google Data and SERP Features. These two modules, which are also available in AWR Cloud, have been revised, redesigned and improved to a shape that we’re very pleased with and which we believe you’ll find much more useful.

Here are some interesting facts about them:

Brand new Google Data module

The new Google Data module integrates within AWR the metrics that every SEO needs:

• historical data from Google Search Console (Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Average Position)
• performance metrics from Google Analytics (Visits, Organic Visits, Total Revenue, Transactions and your custom defined Goals)
• (not provided) keyword traffic
• and two proprietary metrics (Click Opportunities and Not Provided Sessions) which can help you take better and faster decisions on your targeted keywords.

Website Performance Trends

AWR’s new Google Data module comes with two new, super-useful charts to help you keep track of your website’s progress and diagnose ranking changes, one for each panel of the menu.

Google Data – Overview

The Overview chart brings together relevant SEO metrics from all three main data sources for a website: AWR (ranking), GA (analytics) and GSC (organic visits), and compares their evolution in time. You can get a wide and comprehensive view over your website’s performance and get actionable answers to questions like:

• How do organic ranking boosts/drops affect conversions and sales?
• Why is a website losing organic traffic?
• Am I tracking the most effective keywords?

Feel free to play with metric combinations and date intervals, to spot correlations in trends and single out events or actions that had impact over your website’s evolution.

Google Data – Search Console

The Search Console chart focuses only on GSC metrics as they progress over time across devices at website level, helping you identify gaps in your Google optimization strategy or random events that impact your presence in SERP, such as:

• Seasonal drops in search volume that may cause site Impressions to drop while CTR and Average Position are steady.
• Unintentional website changes that could determine CTR to drop while rankings remain the same.
• Earning SERP features, such as Featured Snippets, that dramatically improve CTR with constant number of Impressions and Avg. Position.

Flexibility in Date Range Selection

With the new update, we’ve implemented a more complex date range selection system for Google Data that would enable you to get fully flexible in processing your data and take maximum advantage of the unlimited historical GSC data that AWR keeps on file for your website.

Both the simple date range selection and compared periods are available as preset intervals and custom defined, and apply to the Search Console chart and data table at the same time.

Keyword Ideas from GSC

In Advanced Web Ranking, keyword data pulled from GSC is not overwritten on updates, so all your keyword history will be available for research at all times. Moreover, you will find relevant keyword ideas piling up and waiting to be put to good use.

Filtering, sorting and comparison capabilities, based on GSC metrics – Clicks, Impressions, CTR and Average Position, as well as Click Opportunities – AWR’s proprietary metric that estimates the amount of clicks you might be losing due to low CTR, make it easy to browse through the keyword list and select those with best chances of driving results.

Once selected, keywords can be directly added to groups in your AWR projects for more accurate monitoring of their ranking.

Not Provided Keywords

Although its importance slowly fades, “not provided” data is still brought up when trying to tie together SEO efforts with the actual GA traffic stats that clients value so much. So “not provided” data continues to be a great addition to AWR’s SEO reporting.

In the new Google Data module, “not provided” traffic is broken down by GSC keywords and listed as a column in the Search Console panel, along with GSC specific metrics and our proprietary Not Provided Sessions metric, which estimates the number of analytics sessions for each keyword, based on the Clicks from Google Search Console.

This combination of metrics makes it possible to get a better understanding of which terms actually drive traffic to your website and discover the unused potential of other new keywords you haven’t focused on yet.

Google Data available for Reporting

Thanks to the new and more flexible reporting system we’ve implemented in the new AWR version, all elements of the new Google Data app section (tables, charts or KPIs) can be included into reports as well.

When adding a Google Data widget to your reports, you will be able to refine the information it contains, just as you can in the UI, and make it relevant to the specific scope of your SEO report.

SERP Features Updated

SERP Features have been enhanced with complex filtering capabilities, now allowing for more ways to slice the data into insightful bits.

With the new SERP features information you are now able to:

• Track your presence in more than a dozen SERP features
• Discover ranking opportunities as special results among your tracked keywords
• Research your competitors’ strategies for ranking in SERP features

SERP Features are available in the Ranking – Keywords panel of the app as a new column, showing all the SERP features triggered by each keyword.

What is so great though is that you can now see at a glance which SERP features your website is ranking for, on each of your tracked keywords:

Moreover, a drop-down filter is now available at the top of your screen, allowing you to play with the information in this new column in multiple ways:

Keep track of the keywords you have won position 0 for

With the new filters, featured snippets (the most craved-for listing of Google) can be monitored with ease.

Just apply the appropriate filter combination on your keyword list and see your keyword rankings for “pozition zero” or any other SERP feature you need, from the over a dozen available for tracking in AWR.

Identify opportunities for quick improvements

You can also filter your list to dig up terms you could fairly quickly be able to win SERP features for. For instance, keywords that trigger SERP features but for which your website fails to earn such listings, even if ranked high in Google.

And if you’re ready to get even more specific, you can filter the list further by type of SERP feature, and focus only on the type of content you’re most confident building.

You can also go broader than the first page of results, or narrower, depending on your own strategy.

Keep track of competitors’ strategies for ranking in SERP features

SERP features filters work on your competitors’ websites as well, so you can definitely use them to highlight which features your competitors have earned for the SERPs you share, and identify what type of content you need to further focus on to gain more SERP property.

Adding SERP Features info to reports

SERP Features are now also available for reporting, with a table-type Keyword Ranking widget that has the exact same options and filters available in the Rankings-Keywords app panel.

If you prefer using the export options available in the Rankings-Keywords app panel, that would work too – both the PDF and the CSV exports include the SERP features info.

What’s next?

We’re looking forward to hear what you think of the new AWR. These two recent features should provide you not only with more insight into your SEO projects, but also help you reach your goals more efficiently.

On a final note, it’s important to remind all existing AWR Cloud users that nothing will change. This means that you can use the current AWR Cloud for as long as you want and we’ll make sure you will get the same, great rank tracker as before.

And since both versions share the same backend infrastructure, you can switch back and forth between AWR Cloud and the new AWR at any time. As for any future users, we’re confident that you’ll find the new AWR a pleasure to work with.

Last but not least, I would like to thank everyone that helped us with suggestions. The app will continue to grow thanks to the precious feedback we get from you.

Special thanks go to the awesome AWR team (from developers and testing to the support and marketing teams) who made all these amazing things possible. #kudos

Now it’s your turn. I’m looking forward to your thoughts on the new AWR. Have you tried it yet? What do you enjoy the most?

The Setup

We started monitoring mobile search a few weeks ago with the help of the Google Algorithm Changes tool. Yesterday, on April 21st, Google publicly announced that the mobile update rollout has began. But as you can see in the data we collected so far, things haven’t been very calm in the mobile SERPs for the past week either.

This bar chart shows the ranking changes factor for each day. It’s color changes from green (fewer changes) to yellow (moderate changes) and red (major changes), depending on the number and severity of ranking changes.

The blue line shows the organic visibility of all the websites that we track in AWR Cloud. In the case above, when the organic visibility decreases, it means that, on average, the websites we track are experiencing lower rankings in Google mobile search results.

You can also see this report with your own website visibility in your AWR Cloud account.

Some of the changes you see in the chart above may have been caused by last minute changes by webmasters in order to make their websites mobile friendly. Some are probably tests ran by Google in preparation for the big algorithm change.

To get an idea of the scale of these changes, while on a normal day, around 120 thousand URLs move up and down in the SERPs, the last 6 days have all been red lines, moving about 250 thousand URLs every day. That’s on average about 40% of the 600 thousand URLs that we track daily.

What’s interesting is that the Top 20 results haven’t been affected that much. The major changes happened below the third page.

This could mean that established sites (that have been mobile friendly for a while) were already occupying the Top 20 results and were not affected that much by this algorithm update. Reversely, the sites that are not mobile friendly and are ranking between the third and fifth page are beeing replaced in the SERP by other sites that are mobile friendly.

The Study

While the Google Algorithm Changes tool proved to be a very helpful ally, we thought we should dig a bit deeper and precisely see how rankings changed for both mobile friendly and non-mobile friendly websites. So we started monitoring some websites from the same industry and checked them every day to see how their rankings evolve before and during this update.

There was no surprise to see that the mobile friendly websites kept moving up in the SERPs, while the non-friendly ones were dropping. Here’s the typical ranking evolution of the mobile-friendly and non-mobile friendly websites, during the update:

Tweet this: On average, we have seen a 12% increase in ranking visibility for the mobile-friendly websites compared with their visibility on Google Mobile from a week ago.

As for the non-mobile friendly websites, their drop in visibility was slow but steady, proving somewhat that the update was gradual and not all keywords were affected at once:

These are just some the intial findings. We’ll continue to track and observe the changes for the next couple of weeks, to be sure we’re grasping the full picture, and we’ll keep you all up to date here on this blog and via Twitter.

By the way, if you’re not doing this already, you too can track your Google mobile rankings in AWR Cloud and compare your desktop rankings with the mobile ones.

Has your website been affected by these new changes in the Google Algorithm? Please leave a comment below.

We always strive to give our customers what they’re looking for and make them happy with our products and service. This is why we took one step further today and started this blog.

What do we want to achieve with this blog?

From the beginning we want to make clear the reasons why we decided to start this blog. We want to:

• inform and educate our customers on how to best take advantage of Advanced Web Ranking to improve their website rankings
• improve communication with our customers and make them feel more comfortable using our product
• receive feedback about how our customers use and interact with our product
• add personality to our brand, giving you a more personalized product and service

An impediment for starting blogging earlier was the fact that it’s very important to find the right person to write these articles. That’s because the right person to blog is not always the person who knows the product best. The right person also needs to have the ability to write well and make things easier for you to understand.

That is why we decided to encourage multiple folks from our team to post and you should expect to see sometimes informal posting, but most of the time, comprehensive information and advanced tips and tricks.

Here are some of the benefits of reading this blog:

• learn more about Advanced Web Ranking, read tips and best practices
• stay up to date with the latest product and search engines changes
• get links to helpful resources

If you like what you read please subscribe and let us know what you think. Any suggestions or questions you may have are welcome.

The Advanced Web Ranking Team