Inspired by Neil Walker’s post on determining natural click through rate by position, I’ve been playing around with Google’s click through rate and average position data that is now available via Webmaster Tools.
There are lots of great obvious – and not so obvious – things you can do with the data, but that’s for a later post. Today I’m going to highlight a few fundamental problems I’ve spotted with the data.
For the above keyword, the website in question consistently has a double listing – position 1 and 2 (it’s a brand term so unlikely to be subject to personalised search). So, whenever someone searches for this keyword both the 1st and 2nd listings get an impression. Obviously most people click the first listing, hence the 67% CTR for position 1 and the low 3% CTR for position 2.
So, while it is correct to say that both position 1 and 2 get 301,000 impressions – it’s important to note that they are the same 301,000 impressions.
When displaying top level keyword data (as highlighted in the diagram above) Google’s calculations are simply wrong. For this keyword, the total impressions should read 301,000. Instead the impressions for all positions have been summed (it doesn’t exactly add up but that’s another story!). And why total clicks are reported as 201,000 rather than 201,000 + 9,900 + 390 etc is beyond me. With impressions and clicks used to calculate CTR these errors render that metric completely useless. Similarly with average position – surely if you always appear in #1, you want Google to report your average position as 1, rather than calculating it based on all of the other positions that you also appear in?!
It’s a real shame because the integration of this data into GWT was potentially a great step forward. With these sorts of issues though, along with inaccuracies reported by others, it has unfortunately fallen short.
Yep, you hit the right notes there, i’ve started looking at this data, but just the figures were causing more questions that the post was supposed to be answering.
Remember that if you are displayed in the Google (local pax) that they can count as the first 10 results, so if you are ranked #2 for the term but in local results you are shown as #5 it would likely affect the average rankings.
Also my guess is that this data is similar to adwords, where it may not be the actual search query just the exact match and may include/discount long tail keywords. The other issue is around you might only rank #3 for that mispelt keyword so this will affect your average position. Google has likely just averaged the data and presented it to make it useful but without giving away the farm…
Using this data, ive highlighted that letter case also appears to be a factor in the mix…
http://thelostagency.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/google-influenced-by-case/
Still, a 67% clickthrough rate is nothing to be sad about! Was this a branded/navigational term or a competitive keyword? Did it have any PPC ads above it?
I have noticed that Click through Rates have fallen for my sites since the introduction of local search. Accurate or not organic CTr’s are a Falling