SEMRush Zero-Click Study: 0.02% Clicks to Ads?

[NexstarNickR]

I was just looking at the SEMRush Zero Click Survey published October 2022, and they state that the amount of searches on mobile devices that result in a click on a paid ad are 0.02% of searches. This seems crazy low. Does anyone have other research they have seen that looks different? Is this really the trend in mobile?

 

[JS Girard]

What reasons do you have to say that 0.02% "seems crazy low"? Because 0.02% of trillions of searches is still a huge amount of clicks.

Also worth remembering: their study literally only counted the first click done on the page. So that's going to skew the numbers too.

 

[NexstarNickR]

Originally, I had data from BrightLocal on SERP Clicks, which had the number at ~11.5% (PPC Only / No LSAs, Desktop + Mobile, 2018)

Then, we were looking at numbers that Rand Fishkin from his Jumpshot / SparkToro research. That had Paid Ad Clicks as high as 11% of the clicks on a SERP (only specified "Paid", Mobile only, 2019). It also showed that percentage on a steady incline since 2016.

Then, there was new data from SparkToro (based on SimilarWeb) that dropped that number WAY down to 0.79% ("Paid", Mobile only, 2020).

Now I am looking at the SEMRush 2022 data, which has the number at 0.02% ("Paid", Mobile only, 2022).

During this same span of data, Desktop has also been decreasing, but not as much: 11.5% (merged 2018 data), 6.9% (2019), 2.8% (2020), and now 1.8% (2022). That is a clear downward trend, but not as much as mobile.

Even 0.8% to 0.02% is a huge drop. I know that we are looking at trillions of searches, and I'm not saying that's a small amount of clicks/ads served, but it just seems like the percentage of clicks on paid ads has dropped significantly.

So now I'm trying to make sure I am being logical about what I am looking at: does this indicate that more people are doing searches where ads aren't showing up? Because I don't feel (totally going off of feeling here, I know this isn't data) like the CTRs on Google Text Ads have gone down that much when looking at data in AdWords. So the first conclusion I jump to is that the percentage is shrinking because the amount of searches done overall has to be increasing, and the amount of times paid ads show up as an option might be decreasing?

Any insight people have would be helpful! Just want to be sure my understanding of what this data means is correct as I explain it.

 

[JS Girard]

Thanks for taking the time to share this information. I was genuinely curious, since I'm very much on the sidelines when it comes to pay per click (I've literally only ever clicked on an ad by accident or to make a SEO test, and I don,t handle them at our agency).

 

[beisbol16]

Is it safe to assume that the % of ppl who click on ads is much higher when considering only “local searches”? In other words searches that obviously have a local SAB intent?

 

[NexstarNickR]

If I am interpreting your statement as "people who search for SABs are more likely to click ads than people who search for other topics", I think that's too broad of a statement to make a conclusion on. As compared to general inquiries where people are looking for an answer to a question? Yes, probably. In relation to shopping/ecommerce? Probably not (these are gut feelings, not hard data).

The goal of my question is to figure out how important it is to be in the paid search portion of search engines, and how much we should focus our efforts on mobile ads.

What the data says to me is that out of all the possible scenarios of clicking on something from a mobile device, only 1 in every 5,000 searches results in a paid ad click. For desktop, the ads are clicked 90x more frequently (~1 click : 55 searches on desktop).

With that data, it seems like trying to optimize ads for mobile search might be a waste of time. To find success on mobile, you should focus on organic search, and for desktop, we want to have paid search be a part of our strategy.

Ultimately, I need to spend my time and money wherever I can to get the true results I am looking for; if spending money on google gets the phone to ring and the web forms to be filled at a price that is acceptable, then who cares what the data says? But it just seemed so crazy to see that number at 0.02%.

 

[beisbol16]

If I am interpreting your statement as "people who search for SABs are more likely to click ads than people who search for other topics", I think that's too broad of a statement to make a conclusion on. As compared to general inquiries where people are looking for an answer to a question? Yes, probably. In relation to shopping/ecommerce? Probably not (these are gut feelings, not hard data).

The goal of my question is to figure out how important it is to be in the paid search portion of search engines, and how much we should focus our efforts on mobile ads.

What the data says to me is that out of all the possible scenarios of clicking on something from a mobile device, only 1 in every 5,000 searches results in a paid ad click. For desktop, the ads are clicked 90x more frequently (~1 click : 55 searches on desktop).

With that data, it seems like trying to optimize ads for mobile search might be a waste of time. To find success on mobile, you should focus on organic search, and for desktop, we want to have paid search be a part of our strategy.

Ultimately, I need to spend my time and money wherever I can to get the true results I am looking for; if spending money on google gets the phone to ring and the web forms to be filled at a price that is acceptable, then who cares what the data says? But it just seemed so crazy to see that number at 0.02%.

I agree. The %s seem extremely low. To use my industry (pressure washing, landscaping, home contracting services) as an example, I really cannot imagine that only 1 in 5000 mobile searches click on the ads at the top. I would have guessed it was more like 1 in 10. This is also because the top organic search results in the home services industry are filled with big companies, such as yelp, Angie’s list, etc. Also, just based on the eye test —- google ads seem to convert at a relatively high rate based on overall search volume. I am shocked at the disparity of your numbers and what I would perceive them to be based on my observation. I really do think the industry/searchers intent matters a lot… I’d love to find some more data on all of this.

 

[beisbol16]

If I am interpreting your statement as "people who search for SABs are more likely to click ads than people who search for other topics", I think that's too broad of a statement to make a conclusion on. As compared to general inquiries where people are looking for an answer to a question? Yes, probably. In relation to shopping/ecommerce? Probably not (these are gut feelings, not hard data).

The goal of my question is to figure out how important it is to be in the paid search portion of search engines, and how much we should focus our efforts on mobile ads.

What the data says to me is that out of all the possible scenarios of clicking on something from a mobile device, only 1 in every 5,000 searches results in a paid ad click. For desktop, the ads are clicked 90x more frequently (~1 click : 55 searches on desktop).

With that data, it seems like trying to optimize ads for mobile search might be a waste of time. To find success on mobile, you should focus on organic search, and for desktop, we want to have paid search be a part of our strategy.

Ultimately, I need to spend my time and money wherever I can to get the true results I am looking for; if spending money on google gets the phone to ring and the web forms to be filled at a price that is acceptable, then who cares what the data says? But it just seemed so crazy to see that number at 0.02%.

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