Following on from the recent post SERPs Position and Clickthroughs and after looking more closely at the AOL research data I thought it would be interesting to provide a tool to calculate the percentage increase or decrease in clickthroughs that can be expected in moving from one position in the SERPs to another.
The AOL data contains 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs. Obviously not every search will result in a click through but the reason why the overall rate is so low is because of the way AOL displays the results. AOL’s organic results, which are essentially Google’s, are top and tailed by sponsored listings. So many of them in fact that only 54% of AOL search queries are followed by a click on the organic listings.
However the clickthroughs recorded in the AOL data can be considered as a proxy for the Google SERPs and you can use this tool to see by how much your traffic will increase or decrease when you move from one position to another.



New Position in SERPs (1-100)

Percentage Increase/Decrease in Clickthroughs
Examples:
1. Your current position in the Google SERPs is 15 and you want to know how much more traffic you would get if you moved to position 5.
Current Position in SERPs 15
New Position in SERPs 5
Click ‘Calculate’
Percentage Increase/Decrease in Clickthroughs 936.8%
Your Google traffic will increase by 936.8%
2. Your current position in the Google SERPs is 8 and you want to know how much more traffic you would lose if you moved to position 11.
Current Position in SERPs 8
New Position in SERPs 11
Click ‘Calculate’
Percentage Increase/Decrease in Clickthroughs -78%
Your Google traffic will decrease by 78%
3. Your current position in the Google SERPs is 9 and you want to know how much more traffic you would lose if you moved to position 10.
Current Position in SERPs 9
New Position in SERPs 10
Click ‘Calculate’
Percentage Increase/Decrease in Clickthroughs 5.1%
Yes it’s true, your Google traffic will increase by 5.1% when you go down one from position 9 to 10! This is because the ninth position gets less clickthroughs than the tenth position, which you can see from the charts here.
Thanks to Richard Hearne at Red Cardinal for providing the data on which this tool is based.


Position and Clickthrough Tool - Read More...