In the world of Search Engine Marketing, there are some questions that seem to be as old as the internet itself, and which come up more often than we’d care to admit. For example:

To bid or not to bid on brand terms? (We generally say YES)

What’s a “good” CPC? (We generally say there is no such thing)

Can I bid on my competitor’s brand name? (We generally say YES – go for it!)

And finally:

What’s the click through rate on each organic position?

That last one is a doozy – it can depend on A LOT. Branded vs. Unbranded. Mobile vs. Desktop. Competitive landscape. How Google decides the search engine results page should look any given day, and so on.

So instead of relying on old data from 3rd parties to answer this question for our clients, DMi’s search team came up with our own answer to this question. Then, we can speak from a position backed by real, up-to-date data from our own clients from 2019 and 2020.

To source our data, we used Google Search Console, which will provide clicks, impressions, and average position for every organic query in which your sites appeared over a given time frame. We aggregated the data for the last 6 months from 7 separate sites, all of which vary by industry. In total our data included just under 9 million impressions and over 600,000 clicks. Here are our findings:

For starters, we looked at average click through rate by position on desktop:

And then average click through rate by position on mobile:

So what does this tell us? A few interesting things, actually:

The importance of being in the top position on desktop is VERY real. The CTR for position 1 (36.3%) is over 3x the CTR for position 2 (10.8%).

But…not so much on mobile. We only noticed a small drop-off from position 1 (23.1%) to position 2 (21.6%)

For desktop, it’s first page or bust. 73% of clicks in our data for desktop came from sites in the top 5 positions, and 82.9% of clicks came from the top 10.

For mobile, the stakes are even higher – looks like it’s top 5 or bust. 88.9% of all clicks recorded came from sites in the top 5 positions, and 98% of clicks on sites ranking in the top 10. Have you ever clicked through to the second page of search results on Google mobile? No? Apparently no one else has either.

As more sites continue to allocate portions of their budget and strategy to search engine optimization, the competition for the first page will only intensify. To learn more about what you can to keep your site above the fray, get in touch with the DMi agency services team.