meta description effectiveness

[MPC]

While description doesn't play a role in ranking, it is still an important component in terms of catching the eye of a visitor and getting them to actually click your link.

Is there any data on average clicktrought rate for a term in relation to it's position, expressed in percentage? I'm talking a general guideline, regardless of what the term is.

For instance, if there's 10,000 searches in a month for term X, if you had to break down the total clickthroughs in the top 10 position, what would the percentage look like?

1. 35%
2. 25%
3. 15%
4. 10%
5. 5%
6. 1%
7. 1%
8. 1%
9. 1%
10. 6%


Just throwing these numbers out as an example. What would the actual numbers be?

Is there a way to find out the breakdown based on a specifiy keyphrase?

The reason I ask is I want to evaluate the effectiveness of some of my descriptions.

Is this a good way to go about it? Are there other ways to measure the effectivness of descriptions?

[Stocks]

I dont think they're vey effective as far as people reading them I could be wrong but I never read them I usually just read the title then click. But I do thing its important to have your keywords in the desc tag.

[GFPC]

Good question, I wondered the same from time to time.

Hope more people jump in.

Great question!

[MmS]

In the new webmaster tools you can see views, clicks and clickthroughs for a specifiy keyphrase. If you change your description note down the date when the description is actually updated and visible in the search engine. After a good sample size you can take conclusions. If it's non poker/casino you can also test it with running Adwords adverts.

[D_R_A]

I always place keyword rich descriptions. Its good. its better to have them then not to have them imho...

[Strider1973]

How many times out of 100 searches does G use the meta descriptions and not their own snippets?

[MPC]

100?

[D_R_A]

I try to put in a bit of every "htag", that way i often get my own description in with a sweet call to action on google

[Michael Martinez]

Is there any data on average clicktrought rate for a term in relation to it's position, expressed in percentage? I'm talking a general guideline, regardless of what the term is.

Yes...and no.

Many people have run A/B tests on meta descriptions and found that off-topic descriptions tend to drive the click-throughs down and on-topic, compelling descriptions tend to drive the click-throughs up.

However, the more copy you publish on a page, the more queries it is likely to appear in. The more queries a page appears in, the less likely that the meta description tag will be deemed relevant to a majority of the queries.

The fewer queries the meta description is deemed relevant to, the less it matters to your search conversion experience.

You cannot think of a Web page being married only to your targeted keywords. Once in a while you end up with what I call a "golden page" (you can read more about them here). Basically, the page turns into a superstar for a keyword you never saw value in.

I'm not saying meta descriptions are not important -- I'm just saying that the data people collect about meta descriptions is rather limited. There are so many possibilities for robust article pages now that assuming the meta description tag will always be selected is a mistake.

I encourage people to sprinkle meta descriptive text throughout their articles, to increase the chance that they influence what text snippet the search engines show to searchers regardless of how relevant to targeted keywords the queries are.

[MPC]

Thanks for your feedback everyone.

I'm not saying meta descriptions are not important -- I'm just saying that the data people collect about meta descriptions is rather limited.

Considering this statement, and everything else you said, is it fair to say that my time would be better spent looking at things that are more analyzible?