ETV (Estimated Traffic Volume) is an estimation of website traffic that can be driven by a certain keyword or group of keywords. The metric displays the approximate number of monthly visits a keyword or keywords can bring to a website.

The metric appears in the following endpoints:

• Categories For Domain
• Domain Analytics API – Whois Overview
• Ranked Keywords
• SERP Competitors
• Competitors Domain
• Domain Intersection
• Subdomains
• Relevant Pages
• Domain Rank Overview
• Historical Rank Overview
• Historical Bulk Traffic Estimation
• Page Intersection

 
Using ETV data will enrich your SEO tools, allowing you to estimate the traffic potential of any website by its ranking keywords alone. For example, you can use the Historical Rank Overview endpoint to build a chart with historical ETV data, displaying how the traffic of a specific domain changes over time.

Most of our customers already know how ETV can empower their SEO tools. However, we often get questions regarding how the metric is calculated.

How ETV is calculated

ETV is calculated by multiplying a keyword’s search volume by the click-through rate coefficient of a search result.

ETV = Search volume * CTR coefficient

The CTR coefficient depends on the rank_group (ranking position) of a website.

Website position	CTR coefficient
1	0.304
2	0.162
3	0.0973
4	0.0659
5	0.0469
6	0.0338
7	0.0256
8	0.0197
9	0.015
10	0.0113
11	0.0091
12	0.0075
13	0.0059
14	0.0056
15	0.0051
16	0.0043
17	0.0043
18	0.0033
19	0.0027
20	0.0024
21	0.0023
22	0.0022
23	0.0021

For positions 23 – 100, the coefficient is 0.0021.

If SERP contains paid results, the outcome should be additionally multiplied by one of the following coefficients.

Please note that we consider paid elements only. Shopping, popular_products, knowledge_graph_shopping_item, and other advanced paid elements are not taken into account.

Website position	Coefficient
1	0.76
2	0.78
3	0.81
4	0.86
5	0.91
6	0.93
7	0.96
8	0.978
9	0.97
10	0.95
11	0.94

For positions 11 – 100, the coefficient remains 0.94.

So if your website ranks, say, third in organic search for a keyword with a search volume of 5700, your ETV for this keyword will be:

• If there are no ads — 5700 * 0.0973 = 554.61
• If there are ads — 5700 * 0.0973 * 0.81 = 449.23

 
However, when it comes to calculating ETV for paid search only, we use completely different coefficients.

Paid result position	Coefficient
1	0.0711
2	0.03
3	0.0219
4	0.0215
5	0.0161
6	0.0104
7	0.0089
8	0.0075
9	0.0055
10	0.005

So if you run a PPC campaign for a keyword with a search volume of 5700, and your ad is displayed first in SERP, your estimated paid monthly traffic for this keyword will be: 5700 * 0.0711 = 405.27.

That’s how DataForSEO API calculates ETV for organic and paid search. To learn about how impressions ETV is calculated, please refer to this help article.