What is a good CTR for second page?

Adsense has a general 1-2% CTR but keep in mind that is their over all average, there are so many factors that go into getting readers to click an add that it is impossible to say what a benchmark would be for site A, because site B is a different niche, level of interest, type of reader and different theme.

For my sites I like to see 1-2%, if I start seeing higher or lower I figure out why. Lower means I am losing money and higher means I can raise a red flag.

Thanks for that. Interesting that a high CTR would raise a red flag!

The CTR I'm interested in right now is the ogranic search CTR. I understand that different niches may have slight different click through rates, however I would imagine that there would be set averages (or benchmarks) say for position 1, 2 and 3 of organic search results, as well as averages for 2nd page, and so on.

For example, the CTR for position 1 in page 1 may be 33% (just a number out of a hat, so dont quote me on it). That means that out of all searches done, approximately 33% of the people click on the first result. Perhaps the second result gets 20%, the third 15% and so on. you get my drift.

So if your site is in position 1 and you're seeing a click through rate of say 25% (again just a random number), then you can compare that with the average of 33% for 1st position. This would then lead you to conclude that your click through rate is lower than average and that you must work on increasing it.

Does that make sense?

Oh we are talking about 2 very different things.. *laughs*my bad
but I can still answer your actual question how it relates to myself and the industry numbers I have read..

The Page 1 Position 1 gets an average CTR of 36%, this is not in stone however because I have some keywords that get as high as 60% and some as low as 28%. Once you get to page 2 you are looking at less then 1% or table scraps. One of the things I have done when building content is after I have created the article and moved it to the first page I notice a blend of keywords I didn't consider or had no idea of. I will change my meta description to try and appeal to as many readers as possible but always focusing on the keyword that is getting me paid the most and more often.

Sorry about the confusion above

Thanks Nelapsi. That is exactly what I meant. That depending on where you are in terms of search results, and how your click through rate compares with the standard averages, you can experiment with changing the meta description to determine what makes people 'click'... literally

I thought you were talking about PPC.

The problem is you don't know the click rate for your keywords at the first position. So you can't make a blanket statement that 36% click on the first listing as Nelapsi suggests. It may be an average for all sites but doesn't mean that's what it is in your industry and niche or even for all keywords in that industry. In fact, it's more like 25%, at least from my research using data that is a few years old.

Another reason you don't know the click rate is that you can't really know how many searches on each of your keywords (or keywords you don't know about for which your rank). You're not showing in the same position all the time for everyone doing the search.

Things have changed and change all the time so I don't think you could come up with even a rule of thumb like 10% less CTR for each position down. There's not even a rule of thumb that I can notice in PPC.

My rule of thumb is that 80% of searchers never get past the first page. I think as the search engines improve as they have (better results so more click on first listings so less reason to go to the second page), Nelapsi's 99% is probably closer to reality.

Also, second page is not the same for all searchers. We think of first page as the first ten results but you can change that. I have 50 results per page. But probably 95% of users show the default ten results so not a big issue to consider.