The recently released AOL research data provides some interesting information on clickthroughs as a function of position in the SERPs. Thanks to Richard Hearne over at Red Cardinal, who has imported the data into a MySQL database, I have been able to construct two striking charts.
The first shows the percentage of total clickthroughs versus the position in the SERPs.

It clearly demonstrates the importance of the top position, with the first place site getting 3.5 times the clickthrough rate of the second place site.
The second chart shows the percentage of the first position clickthroughs versus the position in SERPs.

Notice that the ninth position is getting marginally less clickthroughs than the tenth position. This is probably because a few users are not concentrating and click on the tenth result when they really intended to move to the next page of the results.
However the most interesting observation is the dislocation of clickthroughs between tenth and eleventh position. Going from the top of page two, to the bottom of page one, increases the clickthroughs by a factor of 4.5!


SERPs Position and Clickthroughs - Read More...