Beyond Rankings: Exploring the Impact of SERP Features on Organic
  Click-through Rates
Erik Fubel Niclas Michael Groll Patrick Gundlach Qiwei Han Maximilian Kaiser
Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) serve as the digital gateways to the vast
expanse of the internet. Past decades have witnessed a surge in research
primarily centered on the influence of website ranking on these pages, to
determine the click-through rate (CTR). However, during this period, the
landscape of SERPs has undergone a dramatic evolution: SERP features,
encompassing elements such as knowledge panels, media galleries, FAQs, and
more, have emerged as an increasingly prominent facet of these result pages.
Our study examines the crucial role of these features, revealing them to be not
merely aesthetic components, but strongly influence CTR and the associated
behavior of internet users. We demonstrate how these features can significantly
modulate web traffic, either amplifying or attenuating it. We dissect these
intricate interaction effects leveraging a unique dataset of 67,000 keywords
and their respective Google SERPs, spanning over 40 distinct US-based
e-commerce domains, generating over 6 million clicks from 24 million views.
This cross-website dataset, unprecedented in its scope, enables us to assess
the impact of 24 different SERP features on organic CTR. Through an ablation
study modeling CTR, we illustrate the incremental predictive power these
features hold.