CTR positions in search results
As you know, search engine optimization (the main method of attracting new visitors to the site without using advertising) has long been a multi-million dollar industry. According to various estimates, the volume of the market for search engine optimization varies from $ 50 million to $ 100 million, which is comparable with the volume of the media and contextual advertising markets on the Internet separately.
Surprisingly, with such market indicators, the SEO services themselves are absolutely not formalized. They are not so formalized that customers, who are ultimately interested only in the volumes of attracted traffic, do not know in advance what they are buying. More precisely, they cannot, a priori, compare SEO services with Internet advertising (be it contextual advertising or media advertising) according to usual indicators, such as CPC, CTR, etc.
I tried to find at least some research on this. I can not say that I tried very hard :), but in the end all the information on this matter comes down either to sad Ashman shit (attempts to calculate the CTR of the search results regardless of the subject and type of query), or to empty conversations of optimizers fearing to reveal their “secret”.
')
Many at this moment will surely say that, as for figley, SEO is a “semi-legal” service that in some cases violates the rules of search engines, which increases the danger of getting a ban or some other anathema from the latter. And the less you "shine", the calmer the life.
It's clear!
It is surprising more. Surprising is the position of customers who are ready to allocate solid budgets for SEO just because they have read somewhere on the Internet that it’s cool.
In short, it's all the lyrics. The real thought is that it’s not time to launch full-fledged independent research that would result in real SEO performance data? TNS Gallup will soon begin to monitor the display advertising on the Internet - it is possible that search engines should be confused in response to measuring the position of companies in search results ...
Unfortunately, there is no such research so far, and you have to be content with trifles.
Introductory
There is a website of the company Pervodrach (the name has been changed for obvious reasons), which is promoted for a number of requests on insurance topics. These requests are:
- insurance
- auto insurance
- Casco
- osago
- property insurance
- insurance companies
- Pervostra (company name)
- first fear (slightly modified company name)
- secondary (name of the company competing with Pervostrakh)
Promotion and monitoring was carried out during June 2007.
Transition statistics to the company's website Pervosrach was calculated using one of the free attendance counters.
The purpose of this study is to empirically obtain data on the CTR of individual positions of the Yandex search results for these queries.
Assumptions in the study model
1. The ratio of hits of the first search page strictly by the considered query to the total number of hits (all pages of search results) for queries containing the query in question is from Yandex equal to the same ratio of the Rambler.
2. The distribution of requests on weekdays is uniform throughout the month, that is, it does not depend on the specific date and day of the week. A similar assumption is made regarding the distribution of requests over the weekend.
3. The ratio of the average number of requests on a weekday to the number of requests on a day off is assumed to be 2. This number is calculated on the basis of statistics of the total number of hits in Yandex search for June - the number of hits on weekdays is twice as many as on weekends.
4. The CTR data of a search engine position is calculated using data for at least three days. That is, if the site for some request has stayed at the considered position for less than three days, then the CTR for this case is not calculated due to the large error.
Settlement procedure
1. The number of hits per day.
Let be:
• Yakh - the number of impressions (of all the search results pages) for the considered query in Yandex for June,
• Rx - the number of impressions (of all pages of search results) for the considered query in the Rambler for June
• R1 - the number of hits on the first page of the request in the Rambler for June.
Then the desired number of hits on the first page of the request in Yandex (that is, the page on which Pervostrakh’s website was launched) is calculated, bearing in mind assumption 1, as a proportion:
1 = * R1 / Rx
For the query "insurance" for June we get:
Yah = 156'429 ( source )
Rx = 62'911 ( source )
R1 = 4'815 ( source )
We get H1 = 11'973
Remembering that in June there are 30 days, of which 20 are weekdays and 10 weekends, and also looking at assumption 3 (which is twice as many requests on weekdays), we get the number of hits on our site for “insurance” per day.
On weekday: 478
Closed: 239
Similarly, we calculate the number of impressions per day for other requests.
2. Actually CTR (share of clicks per 1000 impressions)
For each day of June and each of the requests considered, we calculate the “local” CTR = (transitions / impressions) * 100%
Next, for each of the requests we write out, at what positions the search results managed to stand on the site for the month. If, on a specific request, the site has stayed at some position for less than three days, then the calculation for this case is not performed (see Assumption 4).
For other cases, the CTR is calculated as a sample average:
CTR = (CTR1 + CTR2 + ... + CTRn) / n,
where n is the number of days the site has stayed on this position for the given request.
It is important that the calculation is carried out separately on weekdays and weekends.
results
I counted requests for the name of the company, for the whole month at once without dividing into weekdays and weekends, because the site did not change positions on these requests. It turned out the following:
findings
1. The obvious and without research statement - CTR depends on the relevance of the search results - confirmed here very clearly. CTR scatter is possible within all acceptable values, from 0% to 100%. If people are looking for “Pervodrach” and Pervostrakh’s website is in the first place, then this is almost 100% CTR (on average less per month, but almost 100% on weekdays). On the other hand, in the strongly “blurred” query “insurance”, Pervostrakh’s first place in the search results gives an order of magnitude lower results - about 5% CTR, which is comparable with the contextual advertising indicators. Thus, promotion at the request of CTP, for example, is more profitable than promotion at the request of insurance. Despite the fact that the latter has twice the number of impressions, the former gives twice as many conversions due to four times as much CTR.
2. CTR on requests for insurance on weekdays is about 30% higher than on weekends. It is clear that the main persons interested in insurance are looking for information about insurance more actively on weekdays, using Internet access at work.
3. According to “blurred” requests like “insurance” or “insurance companies”, the difference in CTR between the first places is insignificant. In the case of "insurance companies" even, on the contrary, there is an increase in CTR from 1st place to 3rd. For more specific requests, a rather sharp decrease in CTR is observed with a decrease in position.
4. Even on competitors, you can break your penny. 7th place on request “secondary” gives Pervodrakh 100-200 visitors per month.
PS If you know the published similar studies, throw, please, links in the comments.
Source: Oddboy
Surprisingly, with such market indicators, the SEO services themselves are absolutely not formalized. They are not so formalized that customers, who are ultimately interested only in the volumes of attracted traffic, do not know in advance what they are buying. More precisely, they cannot, a priori, compare SEO services with Internet advertising (be it contextual advertising or media advertising) according to usual indicators, such as CPC, CTR, etc.
I tried to find at least some research on this. I can not say that I tried very hard :), but in the end all the information on this matter comes down either to sad Ashman shit (attempts to calculate the CTR of the search results regardless of the subject and type of query), or to empty conversations of optimizers fearing to reveal their “secret”.
')
Many at this moment will surely say that, as for figley, SEO is a “semi-legal” service that in some cases violates the rules of search engines, which increases the danger of getting a ban or some other anathema from the latter. And the less you "shine", the calmer the life.
It's clear!
It is surprising more. Surprising is the position of customers who are ready to allocate solid budgets for SEO just because they have read somewhere on the Internet that it’s cool.
In short, it's all the lyrics. The real thought is that it’s not time to launch full-fledged independent research that would result in real SEO performance data? TNS Gallup will soon begin to monitor the display advertising on the Internet - it is possible that search engines should be confused in response to measuring the position of companies in search results ...
Unfortunately, there is no such research so far, and you have to be content with trifles.
Introductory
There is a website of the company Pervodrach (the name has been changed for obvious reasons), which is promoted for a number of requests on insurance topics. These requests are:
- insurance
- auto insurance
- Casco
- osago
- property insurance
- insurance companies
- Pervostra (company name)
- first fear (slightly modified company name)
- secondary (name of the company competing with Pervostrakh)
Promotion and monitoring was carried out during June 2007.
Transition statistics to the company's website Pervosrach was calculated using one of the free attendance counters.
The purpose of this study is to empirically obtain data on the CTR of individual positions of the Yandex search results for these queries.
Assumptions in the study model
1. The ratio of hits of the first search page strictly by the considered query to the total number of hits (all pages of search results) for queries containing the query in question is from Yandex equal to the same ratio of the Rambler.
2. The distribution of requests on weekdays is uniform throughout the month, that is, it does not depend on the specific date and day of the week. A similar assumption is made regarding the distribution of requests over the weekend.
3. The ratio of the average number of requests on a weekday to the number of requests on a day off is assumed to be 2. This number is calculated on the basis of statistics of the total number of hits in Yandex search for June - the number of hits on weekdays is twice as many as on weekends.
4. The CTR data of a search engine position is calculated using data for at least three days. That is, if the site for some request has stayed at the considered position for less than three days, then the CTR for this case is not calculated due to the large error.
Settlement procedure
1. The number of hits per day.
Let be:
• Yakh - the number of impressions (of all the search results pages) for the considered query in Yandex for June,
• Rx - the number of impressions (of all pages of search results) for the considered query in the Rambler for June
• R1 - the number of hits on the first page of the request in the Rambler for June.
Then the desired number of hits on the first page of the request in Yandex (that is, the page on which Pervostrakh’s website was launched) is calculated, bearing in mind assumption 1, as a proportion:
1 = * R1 / Rx
For the query "insurance" for June we get:
Yah = 156'429 ( source )
Rx = 62'911 ( source )
R1 = 4'815 ( source )
We get H1 = 11'973
Remembering that in June there are 30 days, of which 20 are weekdays and 10 weekends, and also looking at assumption 3 (which is twice as many requests on weekdays), we get the number of hits on our site for “insurance” per day.
On weekday: 478
Closed: 239
Similarly, we calculate the number of impressions per day for other requests.
2. Actually CTR (share of clicks per 1000 impressions)
For each day of June and each of the requests considered, we calculate the “local” CTR = (transitions / impressions) * 100%
Next, for each of the requests we write out, at what positions the search results managed to stand on the site for the month. If, on a specific request, the site has stayed at some position for less than three days, then the calculation for this case is not performed (see Assumption 4).
For other cases, the CTR is calculated as a sample average:
CTR = (CTR1 + CTR2 + ... + CTRn) / n,
where n is the number of days the site has stayed on this position for the given request.
It is important that the calculation is carried out separately on weekdays and weekends.
results
I counted requests for the name of the company, for the whole month at once without dividing into weekdays and weekends, because the site did not change positions on these requests. It turned out the following:
findings
1. The obvious and without research statement - CTR depends on the relevance of the search results - confirmed here very clearly. CTR scatter is possible within all acceptable values, from 0% to 100%. If people are looking for “Pervodrach” and Pervostrakh’s website is in the first place, then this is almost 100% CTR (on average less per month, but almost 100% on weekdays). On the other hand, in the strongly “blurred” query “insurance”, Pervostrakh’s first place in the search results gives an order of magnitude lower results - about 5% CTR, which is comparable with the contextual advertising indicators. Thus, promotion at the request of CTP, for example, is more profitable than promotion at the request of insurance. Despite the fact that the latter has twice the number of impressions, the former gives twice as many conversions due to four times as much CTR.
2. CTR on requests for insurance on weekdays is about 30% higher than on weekends. It is clear that the main persons interested in insurance are looking for information about insurance more actively on weekdays, using Internet access at work.
3. According to “blurred” requests like “insurance” or “insurance companies”, the difference in CTR between the first places is insignificant. In the case of "insurance companies" even, on the contrary, there is an increase in CTR from 1st place to 3rd. For more specific requests, a rather sharp decrease in CTR is observed with a decrease in position.
4. Even on competitors, you can break your penny. 7th place on request “secondary” gives Pervodrakh 100-200 visitors per month.
PS If you know the published similar studies, throw, please, links in the comments.
Source: Oddboy
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/13551/
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