Click-Through Rates and Mobile Devices
Click-through rates (CTR) have proven over time to be extremely important in determining how popular a certain link will be among users who search for certain keywords. The metric was originally used for solely desktop users because mobile devices were not able to use search engines years ago, but now, with the development of technology, mobile phones are capable of many astounding, useful features – one being searching the internet. This rise in mobile search usage made it important for companies such as Google to analyze how different mobile searches are from regular desktop searches and to use this data to their advantage.
After the research conducted about the comparison between mobile and desktop searches, a surprising difference between the click-through rates of the two was found. Apparently, people who search something on their phone are more likely to click on the second and third page of results than the desktop users even though the mobile users are presented with fewer search results in front of them at once. Despite this surprise, it was determined that no matter the medium of searching, mobile or desktop, users are always the most likely to click on the first page of results since 71% of searches result in a click on the first page, meaning that the first page is much more popular than any of the the following pages. For the most part, the click-through rates don’t change until the second and third page are reached. Here, the click-through rates for mobile users are higher than those of desktop users. Branding and search criteria can affect the order of the results and the clicks by users, but overall, a first page ranking is the best positioning for any link.
The article discusses how important it is for pages to have a first page ranking because these pages comprise the majority of clicks by users when they are searching for information. This makes sense because as we learned, advertisers with the highest click-through rates are always attaining the top slot on the page. This demonstrates just how influential click-through rates are in determining a page’s placement among thousands upon thousands of search results. The analysis of these click-through rates also showed the surprising fact that mobile users move on to the second and third search pages more than desktop users. This new information provided to search engines, although not very earth-shattering, signals that the advancement of technology is slowly changing the search process. Mobile devices will change how search engines are utilized even more in the near future, and the companies behind these searches will have to develop new methods of dealing with these new users and optimizing how click-through rates are used for positioning on mobile devices. The data compiled through analyzing the click-through rates illustrates how useful CTRs are in helping companies notice changes in the search engines and providing opportunities for improvement in these areas.
http://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/news/data-ctr-for-mobile-search-shows-surprising-variation/