Keyword opportunity & Google flights

[Netprofiler]

I am currently giving keyword advise for an airline company. Since they have huge competition from sponsored 'Google Flights', I was really happy with the 'Keyword Opportunity'-metrics in the Keyword Explorer. However, Google flights does not seem to be consistently taken into account for the Keyword Opportunity score.

Eg. 'Place A to Place B' gets a low opportunity score (50-60), which makes sense, because there are four Adwords ads + a huge 'Google flights' box above the classic 10 blue links.

However 'Flight from Place A to Place B' gets a score of 90-100. If I check the last query, there is the same 4 Adwords ads, and also the Google Flights box.

The Opportunity score seems completely unreliable here?

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Help Team here. I think I can help explain why you're seeing such different Opportunity scores in Keyword Explorer for two very similar searches.

Opportunity Score is designed to calculate the relative Click-through-Rate (CTR) of the organic web results in any given Google Search Engine Result Page (SERP). Google SERPs that have very few non-traditional ranking features and are more similar to the classic “ten blue links” only model will have very high Opportunity Scores. SERPs that have many features - like images, ads, news results, answer boxes, knowledge graph panels, etc. - will have much lower Opportunity scores. We use an averaged CTR model derived from our anonymized clickstream data to build this useful metric and apply it based on the features we see in Google’s results.

I ran a quick test using the search terms "Seattle to San Francisco" and "Flight from Seattle to San Francisco", and here's what I saw: http://www.screencast.com/t/iZzvZKx7ov 
It looks like the difference in SERP features present for that search is the reason that searches of this type are getting different Opportunity scores.

I hope this helps! If you have more questions or need some further clarification, feel free to write in to help@moz.com any time!