26 November 2009 | Author: M. Thomson SEO & Affiliate Consultant

Google Sitelinks (CTR) research revealed

Google's Sitelinks have been in existence since late 2006, but few studies have been carried out to discover how much attention each Sitelink receives. While user-testing studies have been performed to follow eye and mouse tracking, no public studies have been released regarding click through rates.

Bigmouthmedia can now reveal the click through rate (CTR) of Google Sitelinks obtained from a recent data mining activity.

Research

Using a pool of different websites, all featuring Google's Sitelinks, bigmouthmedia researched and extracted the click through rate for each Sitelink. The overall goal is to provide a greater insight into the importance of each Sitelink, its position and the impact that the destination landing page will have on factors such as conversion rates.



CTR Including Main Search Result

Below is a graph outlining the click through rate of each landing page, including the main search result.





CTR Excluding Main Search Result
Below is a graph outlining the click through rate of each landing page, excluding the main search result.




Analysis & Findings

Now that the data has been captured and presented, we are able to provide the following useful analysis and findings:

• Sitelink one receives more clicks than Sitelinks five to eight inclusive, or the entire right hand side of the Sitelink results.
• Sitelink one also receives more clicks than the rest of the Sitelinks on the left hand side inclusive.
• Sitelink one receives almost 2.5 times more clicks than Sitelink two.
• Sitelink five receives more clicks than Sitelink four.
• The click through rate for each Sitelink declines in numerical order, with the exception of Sitelinks four and five, with Sitelink five receiving more clicks than Sitelink four.
• If you order the Sitelinks from left to right and top to bottom, it produces the following graph. It clearly shows that the left-most Sitelink always receives the most clicks.

Ad Sitelinks

In mid 2009, Google began testing Sitelinks in AdWords. In tests sighted, only four Sitelinks were shown, as opposed to the typical eight. Since then, Google has gradually begun to roll out Ad Sitelinks in other countries, including the UK.



With Ad Sitelinks being a feature of AdWords that is here to stay, it is important to know how much potential click through each Ad Sitelink will receive. From initial tests, ads that run with Ad Sitelinks typically result in an average click through rate increase of 30%.

Here's what the Google AdWords blog had to say:

"Ad Sitelinks is a new AdWords feature that allows you to extend the value of your existing AdWords ads by providing additional links to content deep within your sites."

Data Sources

If you want to know more about the data sources and how the results were calculated, all details are outlined below:

• Using Google Analytics, custom segments were used to monitor the position of eight Sitelinks.
• Using only websites where Sitelink positions remained static, Google Analytics custom reporting allowed bigmouthmedia to filter the amount of traffic to each Sitelink for a single brand search term. This was achieved for organic and Google sources only. Traffic figures were extracted for a total of thirty days.
• Extracts were logged in Excel, and data was then averaged to get final figures. In total, 2,479,331 visits were tracked across twenty websites from multiple verticals.

In conclusion, there is much to take from this research. One of the main thoughts is that Google's move to make its search results more effective is clearly being successful, as this research proves that users are making great use of Sitelinks.

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