Top 3 spots in Google make up 62% of all traffic
How much is the top spot on Google actually worth? According to data from the Chitika network, it’s worth double the traffic of the #2 spot.
In order to find out exactly how much traffic number 1 spot was worth, Chikita looked at a sample of traffic coming into their advertising network. The top spot generated 34.35% of all traffic in the sample, almost as much as the numbers 2 through 5 slots combined.
Here are the positions and their total/relative values.
| 1 | 2,834,806 | 34.35% |
| 2 | 1,399,502 | 16.96% |
| 3 | 942,706 | 11.42% |
| 4 | 638,106 | 7.73% |
| 5 | 510,721 | 6.19% |
| 6 | 416,887 | 5.05% |
| 7 | 331,500 | 4.02% |
| 8 | 286,118 | 3.47% |
| 9 | 235,197 | 2.85% |
| 10 | 223,320 | 2.71% |
As you can see, the benefit of being in the top three is huge. This is backed up by an eye tracking study performed at Cornell University. They used a sample of undergraduate students instructed to perform search in Google for 397 queries of topics covering movies, travel, music, politics, local and trivia. Here were the results;
In 2006 AOL leaked millions of search records showing click rates by position. Jim Boykin’s blog reveals the percent of clicks for each position for 9,038,794 searches and 4,926,623 clicks. Donna Fontenot shared the relative click volume of lower ranked results relative to the top ranked site.
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UPDATE
Recent calculations revealed an 18.2% CTR for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for No. 2. CTR for each position below the fold (Positions 5 and beyond) is below 4%. The implication is that 52.32% of all clicks go on the front page.
