Are there any recent studies of organic CTR vs. PPC CTR?

[Nikolaj-Landrock]

Pretty much the title. I am putting together a "game plan" for my CEO, where I would like to touch on the difference in CTR between SERP organic results and SERP PPC results. I've found a few blog posts that talks about PPC being responsible for 15% of all clicks, where 1-5 organic results are responsible for 68ish % and the rest being on 6-10 and page 2/3. However, I do not see any sources in these articles, which begs the question, where are these numbers taken from? Any suggestions?

My own gut feeling (and SERP behaviour) tells me that these numbers might actually be super accurate, but since my business plan will most likely end up in the hands of our board of directors, I would very much like to back up my action points for growth, with actual sources.

Thanks in advance.

[EGOL]

I think that the CTR varies wildly.

It depends upon the skill of the person writing the ads and the title.  It depends upon the topic they are working with and who they are promoting.  It depends how clickbaity, smutty or deceptive they are willing to be.  Depends if they are offering free stuff.

[Smileworks_Liverpool]

It's not always about CTR.  My 1-3 results still get 650% better conversions than anything I do with Paid.  Google are certainly taking clicks from top positions and I'm seeing my number one positions getting less clicks.  interestingly this is not having any effect whatsoever on the bottom line.

What I do see is when I overtake my competitors they start advertising like mad in the Top Ads for those keywords.  But this also doesn't seem to have much of an effect on revenue.

I am trialing something new on the mobile.  If you think about it when you type in a query on the mobile you're always going to see the number one ad result first. It's different from desktop where you can kind of completely ignore the ads and look straight at the map for local or the first organic position.  But for Mobile 100% of searches see that number one position and there's nothing else on the screen.

So I'm putting together a 'branding' exercise where I focus on getting that number one position for all my keywords and seeing how this affects conversion rates.

I wouldn't get too obsessed with click through rates.  Especially with google messing with the layout of the serps so much.  Focus on the bottom line and ROAS.  And I can tell you for nothing that getting in those 1-3 positions is pure gold no matter what the naysayers say about reducing click through rates.

Organic is also 100% the best way you can spend your time and effort and budget.  There's been some big changes recently with (I believe) rolling out previously collected rankbrain data.  I don't think it's real time learning.  I think google collect data, test it and roll it out.  And they recently did that so sites with real quality are now picking up a great deal more search.  So the playing field is levelled against the little guys.

Ads will always have their place for offers and immediate stuff - although since you can get a quality page indexed in 3 minutes these days and change a title and meta in a couple of days, I think ad words is still only a moderately good way of spending your budget.  But i'll report on how my mobile thing progresses.  I have great hopes for it.