Contents 4
Sufficient consensus
Click-through rate is the share of impressions that lead to a click. It is used across display advertising, email and search, it feeds quality scores, and it is one of the few numbers every platform reports the same way.
Titles, descriptions, rich results and position all move it.
If a click meant the page then got read, stay times would follow page length. Nearly half of all first visits were over within 12 seconds.
The published figures on enhanced pages describe enhanced pages, not markup in general. See Click-Through Rate.
| First-time page visits | Value |
|---|---|
| Page shown for less than 4 seconds | more than 17 % |
| Page shown for less than 12 seconds | nearly 50 % |
| Median stay | 12.4 seconds |
| Average length of pages left within 12 seconds | 430 words |
Weinreich, H., Obendorf, H., Herder, E. and Mayer, M., Not quite the average: An empirical study of Web use, ACM Transactions on the Web, 2008. Long-term browser logging of 25 participants, 137,272 page visits.
What the result pages leave out
These belong to the subject. People ask about them. They are missing from the agreed coverage.
- Dwell time. Web tracking isolates the click and records nothing about how long the landing page was actually read.
- Pogo-sticking. The immediate return to the result page is the clearest signal of a disappointed click. Standard click reports do not contain it.
- Position bias. A large part of a click is the rank order the eye reached first.
- Banner blindness. Registered interaction counts say nothing about learned avoidance of the positions where ads sit.
- Ad exhaustion. Click totals are reported without the decay that repeated exposure produces in the same audience.
- Incrementality. Paid clicks are credited with conversions that would also have happened without the ad being shown.
- Cost per acquisition. Front-end impression cost is separated from the full cost of acquiring one customer, so traffic efficiency is judged on click volume.
What people actually want to know
- How do I prove that low interest comes from a weak preview, and not from searchers who already got their answer on the result page?
- Does a better preview text actually bring visitors who stay longer?
- Why is my visitor count dropping every month even though my placement has not changed?
- If hundreds of people see the listing and nobody opens it, what exactly is the message?
- Can I find out which headline works without publishing it and testing it live?
Click-through rate alongside impressions is a fair baseline. Used alone it hides the quality of everything that happens after the click.
High initial response can mask disengagement that only dwell time and the return to the result page would show.
Last revised 2026-09-16.