A Tale of Two Studies: Establishing Google & Bing Click-Through Rates

The main objective of this study, first and foremost, is to better understand user CTR behavior and to help quantify ROI from SEO campagins.  We attempted to do this by answering the following questions:

1. What is our observed CTR curve for organic U.S. results for positions #1-10 in Google SERPs?

2. What is our observed CTR curve for organic U.S. results for positions #1-10 in Bing SERPs?

3. How do the CTR curves for Google and Bing compare with each other?

4. What amount of long-tail click-through can we expect for a keyword that has a stable rank in its SERP?

5. What impact do images, videos, news, places, and shopping results have on user behavior?

An organic Click-Through Rate (CTR) on search engines is one of the best metrics to measure user engagement on the Internet.  Google and Bing have more influence than ever before, controlling over 95% of all search engine queries.

Slingshot SEO conducted this study on user behavior to define the impact of page 1 search engine rankings.  However, for Bing and Google, the user experience is ever-changing.  There have been algorithm updates, a new user interface, increased mobile search, the addition of social signals, and blended search engine results pages (SERPs).  As Bing and Google are constantly working to improve the user experience, we expect even more changes that will have a significant impact on search behavior.

For Google SERPs, the observed CTR was 18.20% for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for a No. 2 rank. For Bing SERPs, the observed CTR was 9.66% for a No. 1 rank and 5.51% for a No. 2 rank. The resulting total average CTR for first page organic results is 52.32% for Google and 26.32% for Bing.

Note that every month, roughly 117 million searches are made for the keyword “google” in Bing. This gives us added insight into the behavior of Bing users, who may trust Google SERPs more than Bing. For the complete study, fill out the form beside.