What’s Estimated Traffic Volume (ETV) and how is it calculated?

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 expected click-through rate (CTR) of a search result:

ETV = Search volume * Expected CTR

In this formula, the expected CTR is the estimated share of clicks a search result receives in its position. It is our proprietary metric based on aggregated click data from real search results, and depends on the following factors:

• the position of the result;
• the search intent of the keyword (informational, navigational, or commercial);
• the elements present on the SERP (such as AI Overviews, featured snippets, images, videos, local packs, and others).

The expected CTR is dynamic and not tied to any static coefficients. It is recalculated regularly as click behavior and SERP layouts evolve.

The search volume used for the calculation of ETV is primarily DataForSEO’s search volume – Google search volume normalized with clickstream data. When clickstream data is not available for a keyword, the default Google search volume is used.

How does the calculation logic work in practice? Let’s assume a website ranks #3 on a page for a keyword with commercial intent and 5,700 monthly searches. The SERP also features an AI Overview and images. For this SERP layout and website position, the model predicts a CTR of, say, 1.5%.

The ETV is calculated as follows: 5,700 × 1.5% ≈ 85 visits

The same rank in a cleaner SERP could be several times higher. For instance, the model may predict a CTR of around 10% for the same keyword in that SERP. Subsequently, the number of visits increases to 570.

ETV calculation for non-organic elements

Non-organic elements (ads, featured snippets, local pack, AI Overview, etc.) share the leftover click probability: the first gets half, the next a quarter, and so on. This is best illustrated by the example below.

Let’s take the same keyword with 5,700 monthly searches with commercial intent that ranks in a SERP containing an AI Overview, People Also Ask, and an images/video section. For that SERP composition and intent, our system estimates the share of organic CTR for positions 1-100 at about 41.5% of all clicks. Hence, the leftover CTR for non-organic results is 58.5% of the keyword’s searches.

The CTR and ETV for each paid element will be calculated as follows:

Each subsequent element receives half of the previous element’s share, and a share is assigned only if it amounts to at least one visit.

That’s how DataForSEO API calculates ETV for organic and paid search. By applying advanced algorithms and assessing multiple dynamic factors, such as SERP layout and search intent, we can calculate ETV to estimate traffic potential with as much accuracy as possible.