WebProNews » enquiro

Top Ad + Top Organic = Buy

WebProNews Staff — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:36:33 +0000

Searchers are more likely to consider purchasing, to remember specific brands, and to associate specific brands with keywords when ads are in the search results, according to a newly study from Enquiro.

Conversely, searchers were less likely to consider purchasing a brand that doesn’t appear in on the search results page.

(Editor’s Note: The study, which found that search advertising was good, was sponsored by Google. And if you’re extra cynical, that’s like AT&T sponsoring research finding that Network Neutrality is bad. But Enquiro’s a reputable firm, so we’ll run with it. – Jason)

Participants were instructed to search for "fuel efficient cars," and then were questions about their research to determine attitudes toward and awareness of Honda. Each group were presented with different search results, some where Honda did not appear in the results, some with only a side sponsored ad listing, some with just a top organic listing, some with just a top sponsored ad listing, and some with both top sponsored and top organic.

The study found the most powerful results when both a top ad and a top organic listing were present. When later asked to think about fuel efficient cars and list which cars came to mind, 16 percent more of the group that saw both the top sponsored ad and the top organic result associated fuel efficiency with Honda. Further, there was a 42 percentage point gap between Honda and other brands, and a seven percent increase when only a side ad listing present.

When asked which brands they remembered seeing in the search results, the participants were over twice as likely to name Honda when both the top ad and the top organic were present.

Having a top sponsored ad and a top organic result also increased purchased consideration by eight percentage points. Searchers were 16 percentage points less likely to consider purchasing a brand not listed in the search results at all.

This result held true even for branded queries ("Honda fuel efficient cars"). When a top ad listing was added to a top organic listing, searchers were seven percentage points more likely consider a purchase.

Enquiro interprets the results to mean advertisers should purchase both branded and non-branded keywords. Based on eye tracking results, the company also recommends placing branded keywords in the title, the URL, and as close to the start of the description as possible.

The study comes amid increasing concerns over ad-blindness among consumers. Past eye-tracking studies have shown that searchers are increasingly likely to ignore not just advertisements but also actual content in places where they expect advertising to be, namely at the top or the right side of the page.

The whitepaper from the study with charts and graphs can be found at Enquiro’s website.

The Difficulty With Grabbing Attention In Search

WebProNews Staff — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:57:24 +0000

Those much-revered top five placements on search engines for a given set of keywords only draws the viewer’s attention for seven seconds. Gord Hotchkiss sees this short attention span as a call to brands to keep doing their market research.

The humorous Short Attention Span Theater of Comedy Central’s earlier days condensed comedy bits into brief pieces slightly longer than a commercial break. Fifteen years ago it was just a funny idea. These days the short amount of time needed to watch them would be a huge obstacle to the typical Internet surfer.

Hotchkiss has been discussing market research, particularly with regards to the studies his firm, Enquiro conducted, like their eye-tracking panels. When it comes to search, online entrepreneurs with solid organic search results, or top placement of paid search ads, may be surprised at how little attention those receive.

(T)he famous golden triangle study we did with Eyetools and Did It, and subsequent ones conducted by Enquiro, have shown over and over how quickly we interact with a search engine and how much of our scanning activity is ‘top loaded’.

Also, we don

Eye Tracking Expert Takes On Google-Baidu Rivalry

Doug Caverly — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 17:25:58 +0000

Google’s not doing too well in China, and a variety of reasons have been given to explain this poor performance. But fact is better than conjecture, and eye tracking is a preferred (and interesting) way of obtaining insight into these matters. So Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss conducted a Google vs. Baidu study.

Baidu Rivalry

A “preliminary full report” is available through Enquiro, and even the summary, posted by Hotchkiss on Search England Land, is over 2,000 words. By this, I mean to say that there’s a lot of valuable information, but you’ll need a fair amount of time to process it. We’ll just be hitting the highlights here.

In short, it appears that, compared to Baidu, Google offers Chinese searchers a more efficient experience. The heatmaps’ hot spots are more condensed, and Hotchkiss notes, “In our study, an average interaction with Google.cn lasted about 30 seconds, and with Baidu over 55 seconds.”

A blind test between Baidu and Google, conducted by another company, even found that Chinese users might prefer the American offering.

So why is Baidu’s market share three times the size of Google’s? Well, we’re moving away from those heatmaps, but Hotchkiss’s ideas are entirely plausible (and are backed by evidence). “There’s a strong preference for a true Chinese search experience,” he writes. “I noticed in a blog that picked up our very early findings that several Chinese users commented that they use Baidu because it is Chinese.”

Then there’s the matter of entertainment, the one area of the blind test in which Baidu beat Google. “Baidu is the primary vehicle to locate and download free MP3 files,” states Hotchkiss. “This generates a huge amount of traffic, as this is one of China’s most popular online activities. There’s no way of knowing what Baidu’s search share might be if you separate the MP3 traffic out, but my suspicion, backed by a conversation with Piewen at Microsoft, is that it would drop dramatically.”

These findings may not help Google much, but they at least help explain how and why the search giant has been minimized in the Chinese market.

SMX: Personalized Search – Fear or Not?

Jordan McCollum — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 21:54:23 +0000

Despite the session’s title, the Q&A quickly devolved into less of a discussion of “Fear or Not” and more into “Why did you do this to us, Google?!” (Followed closely by the response, “You’re not normal. Er, a regular user.”)

Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, Search Engine Land

The basic definition of personalized search is results are reordered based on what’s deemed to meet your personal preferences. Pages may move up or down or even out of the top 10 (usually 1 page leaves the top 10).

Personalization influencers

iGoogle (personal homepage) content

Google bookmarks

Search history (clicks)—a noisy signal to be used on a large scale, but it’s not noisy for just one person

Web history (visits)

Inflates your opinion of Google: I’m #1 for my name! My stuff is tops! I rule.

Google is pushing web history.

And then there’s Yahoo. Their closest competitor in personalization features is MyWeb, which is about two years old. You can save pages to MyWeb. Old features included adding notes and blocking sites (Wikipedia be gone!). Yahoo collected information and could have used it. But they don’t.

Ask’s MyStuff has the ability to save info in folders. (He then gave an example of how to save something.) It’s a fundamental, rudimentary take—let’s reshape our results on what you’re clicking on.

Summary: Google is the only major search engine that’s doing it. Yahoo and Ask are harvesting some information but haven’t put it to use yet. Google is likely to be even more aggressive with personalization over time. Their reasons: it reduces spam (potentially) and delivers better results (potentially).

Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO, Enquiro
(Total side note: Gord was the first “famous person” I encountered at SMX, but I wasn’t brave enough to actually speak to him. I was too busy having a panic attack!)

His presentation’s on what SEO might look like with personalization world, and also what black hat might look like.

SEO pre-personalization revolved around keywords & algorithms (links, keywords, etc).

SEO personalization revolves around users: search history, web history, current tasks, social patterns. If personalization is in place, social search can be an offshoot of personalization. But it’s very difficult for a marketer to look at an individual users.

We think we’re gonna look at buckets of behavior that work around themes: themes around products or things. Long tail optimization becomes really interesting because it’s more personalized—and more important.

Universal results & personalization: personalization can drive a much more confident universal SERP. Gord loves that understanding user behavior will be vital to success. Knowing what people are looking for will be vital. User-centered development will take hold.

Black hat techniques in this area: your results depend on your past history. For optimizers, there is a green field in which they can play: emerging spaces that are new topics without web histories. Create “buzz sites” around new, budding content as an SEO tactic.

Moving up the funnel.

For SEOs, a lot of our optimization has been about moving up the conversion funnel. Personalization moves SEOs up the funnel. We’re more worried about developing stickiness now. Build out of content and functionality. Sites will become research bases. Content aggregations, comparison wizards, mashups will all be popular. Black hats: widgets and gadgets to push visits to site (not inherently black hat, but could be swung that way).

For every theme, we’ll see circles of importance. Handfuls of sites with specific content will emerge for each theme. These will be the first places where people will go when searching for things. These sites get the bulk of early funnel traffic. These will be inundated with offers of RSS content, etc. Black hat: scraping/aggregating content to look like an authority.

User intelligence will become really important. Click-stream-based user tools, engines will introduce tools on the paid side as well. Social bookmarking sites will be hot. Yahoo has del.icio.us; Google has . . . ? Personalization is the scalable way to do social search. There will be more use of profiles in SEO. Black hat: spyware/spam to track clicks. (Hijack?)

Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service
Hooray for personalized search. This is a really exciting time for unethical SEO tactics. Google guidelines say not to install special software to manipulate SERPs—now Google personalized search will do it for you. Tell your clients to sign in on all their computers and visit their sites while signed in: “Hey, we’re #2!”

There’s already a fear of uncertainty: different data centers and geotargeting already create SERPs with varying degrees of differences. Personalized SERPs add more uncertainty to this issue.

This forces your customers to become Google addicts, using all (and only) the Google services.

How is Google dumbing down the user? By teaching users they can use less sophisticated queries (“public library” instead of “boston public library”), they are actually teaching people to think less and trust Google more. People are then less likely to use other search engines.

How to fix some of the problems

Stop hiding the fact that people are logged in

Be clearer on the SERPs when a result is there because of personalized search and not a normal result. If they’re that much better then why not highlight them?

Make it easier for people to turn off personalized search. Right now it’s so difficult.

If you’re going to try to spam personalized search, social media is the best way to do it. That’s your best bet. They’ll bookmark or link to your site. If there are lots and lots of people bookmarking your sites, that’s probably a less noisy and more reliable signal that they’ll take into account.

Tim Mayer, VP of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

One of the big trends in search is understanding the user query better. There are several different ways of doing that. Personalization = understanding the user better. Also under this is query categorization and better understanding query intent.

The subtlety we’ve missed is in user connections.

Different techniques of search personalization

Session-based. Looking at what a user is specifically using for. Disambiguate the query based on the clicks and query. The challenge is figuring out where sessions begin/end. When do you shift topics/themes?

Interest-based personalization. Understand the interests of the user based on their own declared preferences or user behavior inside or outside of the search content. Challenge: users sometimes do searches outside their areas of interest/normal behavior (like client work!)

Impact of personalization on search results

Queries should get shorter. Current average is ~2.7 words. For example: library vs. boston library (quite spooky that he and Gray Wolf would think of almost identical examples).
More of the top ten should be relevant to the user assuming a strict intent is extrapolated from the query.

Impact on SEO

Since they’re doing a better job of matching the results that show up to queries, it behooves SEOs to create more relevant content. Give the search engine enough content per page to help it determine the topicality of that page.

Yahoo’s approach: social

Discovery: Yahoo’s users’ activity in social products (Flickr, Answers, del.icio.us upcoming) can help them discover content that is interesting to them and their community.

Recovery: social search applications can help you save, store and “refind” info that you have found and is important to you.

30-35% of searches are for opinion-based queries: best restaurant, cool lamps. If SEOs come in, these can yield borderline spam sometimes. (He shows an example of a top 10 result for “cool lamps” with, well, not cool lamps. Very normal lamps.)

Socially-influenced results: his friend tagged some cool lamps, he gets served with them. Her reputation is on the line with that link. There’s a social incentive for people to help and tag things appropriately.

Matt Cutts, Software Engineer, Google

(SMX’s bios list his job title as “Software Engineer Guru.” Matt says he only agreed to speak if he didn’t have to use PowerPoint.)
The inherent idea behind personalization is better results. This is powerful because different people think about different things in different ways. Jane’s definition of “kiwi” is different than mine. (Here he gives a Monty Python example: remember the one scene where that one guy can see a knight waaaaay off in the distance riding toward him. He’s far away, still far away, still far away—aah! All the sudden he’s attacking you! Aah!)

Personalization should not be a surprise. It’s been coming for a long time (Danny mentioned how we’ve seen this predicted for years). If we know even a little bit of information because you’re willing to opt in, then we can give you better SERPs.

PageRank by itself takes links and says how important those links are and puts those votes in ranks and runs over and over again.

Everyone has different singular value compositions, etc. You get different PageRanks for pages for sports people and tech people and cat people. Then you can blend that. Personalization is a dense version of PageRank across the entire web.

Personally I think it’s handy. You can find old searches and find what clicks actually helped you.

Is personalization the death of SEO? No, nothing will be. There will always be a need for people to present themselves well and there’s always gonna be people who don’t have time to do it themselves. SEO won’t be the same, but it’s not such a huge change that you won’t recognize it.

For all those who think it’s too hard to turn off personalized search: add this parameter to any search &pws=0 (thanks to Ionut Alex Chitu for that one).

Personalizing news improved the click-through rate 40-50%. Greg Linden (of Findory) said that that seems too low. In his experiments, they were able to get 200% better click through. That’s cool. There’s obviously a lot of opportunity here.

Q&A

There’s a problem of always being logged in: mom’s looking for braeburns, dad’s looking for iPods (ie types of apples)

Matt: we break it into sessions. The results would probably still be better with personalized search, even if they were muddied by multiple users.

Tim: Safe search. Filter on/off

Matt: Don’t argue against data. If people hand you data, don’t not use it. Worst case, they’ll just go back to the baseline if personalization isn’t any better or is totally muddled.

I’m gonna call Matt out: &pws=0 still collects data (ie in your web history)

Matt: You can delete, turn off completely or suspend your web history.

Tim: There’s another clear way to opt out and that’s just not to use Google.

Matt (taking the jab well): Or different profiles.

Click-through rates for paid search results: will their clicks influence their organic results?

Matt: Not now. Web history is trying to provide a complete picture. He thinks it doesn’t influence organic results.

We’ve got a lot of great designers at Yahoo, so why is the Yahoo “Save to My Web” button so ugly?

Tim: If you don’t like the my web one, you might like del.icio.us better.

Danny (teasing): Is that a hint? Are you phasing it out? Oh, sorry, Matt—I would have used PicasaWeb & Google Bookmarks but… I don’t.

Tim: They’re not as good.

Do you incorporate any kind of Google Coop subscriptions in personalized search?

Matt: That’s a good question [which of course really means “I have to think for a second” or “that’s a good question—for you to ask someone else”], honestly I’m not 100% sure. I can imagine that happening. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that over time. If it improves the quality of results, we want to do it.

Supplemental pages & personalized search: is it possible to use personalized search to find supplemental pages that are hard to find in main index?

Matt: You could, but it would be a little tricky because you’re trying to bootstrap. We call it “huffing your own signal” [does it kill brain cells?]. If a page never gets hit, it’s not as helpful.

Follow up: I ask because every time I get into an argument with a peer, I go to your blog to quote you, and a lot of the pages on your blog are supplemental.

Poll: How many are afraid of personalized search? A few. How many opted out? Many. Some were like “okay.”

Danny: What if Ask were doing it? Would it be icky if Ask were doing it?

We hear a lot about the importance of diversity in search results, listing pages from lots of different sites. Might personalized search hinder that?

Matt: The simplest example of that is the current 2 results from each site (called host/site crowding). I think we were the first major search engine to do this. Right after we brought it out, a VC emailed me raving about it. Without it, you’d have all kinds of crap from Geocities or Tripod. You can also think about genres. We need information, blogs, reviews—a good thing all together. It can be complimentary to personal results. Within this genre, what’s the best site for their interests? There’s still a wall for that. By and large, there’s opposition but they can work together.

del.icio.us has a diverse audience that’s actively tagging. Is it influencing SERPs?

Tim: We use signals from those pages to increase diversity. Rather than just getting signals from you, we’re getting signals from other users who like similar things.

Follow up: Yahoo owns a lot of thematic verticals. Are you going to use that data in SERPs?

Tim: There’s an opportunity for that, but it’s important to give the users what they want & the best results.

How deeply does Google try to guess at or identify the demographic of the user? (gender profiling)

Matt: In my experience, no. You don’t have to provide demographic information to register. Geographic information can make a big difference. Historically, Google hasn’t tried to collect or guess demographic data. I think I saw an MSN paper on trying to guess the age/gender of surfer.

Tim: To clarify that, since Google started as search, and Yahoo started as a media company, we collect different kinds of info. Hotjobs for example required that information to register. They may be useful to search.

Gord: This is marking a new generation for search on marking new signals on query-based intent. We don’t want the organic results and sponsored ads to be too far out of sync: expect the sponsored answer soon. There’s totally arbitrary host crowding.

Personalization impacts familiar territory. But they’ll leverage this however they can to improve search. There’s a lot of room to develop there. It’ll fuel a lot of innovations behind the interface and within the interface itself. If you’re worried about opting in out, you’re an anomaly. We have to think about regular users.

Matt: About 10% of queries are misspelled. If you could guess grade level, age, etc. from those mistakes, if you can find out what kind of a searcher somebody is, you can return better SERPs.

Have you done any eyetracking studies relative to personalized versus nonpersonalized SERPs?

Gord: It’s funny you’ve mentioned that, I was just thinking that. It’s tough because personalization is so individualized, that it’s very tough to mock up. It would be fascinating. If you combine personalization with those results.

Is &pws=0 a one off parameter? What happened to “turn off personalized search”?

Matt: There’s a funny story. We’re trying to simplify a mental model. Very few people actually care. When we have parameters at Google they can be sticky or not. I think it’s not sticky. If you’re checking a bunch of kw, I’d just log out.

I’m upset that there’s no transparency with personalized search. A second issue: I’m lazy user. Most people in search know spell checks work so well that you don’t care about spelling. I know the speller works.

Matt: We think overall it’s better. If you’re not signed in, it’s not personalized.

Gord: On a user basis, how many of you people think personalization will bring better SERPs? A few. How many excited to be able to target ads more effectively? Some. People won’t opt in to get better ads. People will opt in to better SERPs. When you look at opting in on a user basis, think on those lines. They’ll catch up like Marissa [Meyer of Google has] said.

Danny: They’ve long been saying, “We’re gonna personalize everything we can.”

See also: Gord Hotchkiss’s take on the reception of his presentation.

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SEMPO Elects Board Members for 2007

Manoj Jasra — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:45:49 +0000

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) has officially announced this year’s board of directors.

Among the planned 2007 SEMPO initiatives are continuing to build the subscription audience for the SEMPO Institute online distance learning classes. The Institute launched its first series of classes earlier this year and response has been very enthusiastic, says Pruitt. The board officers will meet later in March to map out a plan to take the Institute to the next level of performance

Here are the 2007 SEMPO Board of Directors:

Chairperson: Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO, Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc

President: Jeffrey Pruitt, Executive Vice President, iCrossing

Vice President: Dave Williams, Chief Strategist and Co-Founder, 360i

Treasurer: Dave Fall, Vice President, Product Management – Search Technology, DoubleClick, Inc.

Secretary: Chris Boggs, Search Strategist, Avenue A Razorfish

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What Searchers Think When Looking at Results

Mike Moran — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:25:56 +0000

What are searchers thinking when they stare down a list of search results? Actually, the first thing to keep in mind is that searchers don’t stare at search results. They don’t even read them. They scan them. They quickly skim the page hunting for the word they typed into the search box, along with a few other words they’re thinking but didn’t bother typing.

And they do it quickly. Gord Hotchkiss, CEO of Enquiro says that searchers spend just seven seconds looking at an Internet search results page, and Cornell University says it is less than six. Regardless of the exact amount of time spent, searchers are sizing up the results rapidly.

To see what searchers are seeing, Enquiro conducted an eye tracking study that recorded eye movements (and clicks) and created graphs that corresponded to where searchers looked on the screen and what they "fixated" on. This heat map from Enquiro shows where on the Google results page searchers looked the most. (Searchers using Web site search probably behave in similar ways.) The heat map shows us intense interest in the upper left part of the search results-searchers scan starting at the #1 result to see their search words highlighted in the titles and work their way down the page.

Now, it’s not exactly earth-shattering to hear that searchers look at the top search results, but if you thought that folks were looking at the ads on the right of the screen or the number of search results-well, they don’t look at those areas as much. Where searchers look is important, because people generally don’t click where they don’t look-although some experts cast doubt on eye tracking studies because human eyesight provides considerable peripheral vision. (Some people actually do click scroll bars and other areas without looking at them.) Regardless, where searchers look gives us great clues as to what has their attention and, thus, could attract their clicks.

Moreover, only about 60 percent of Internet searchers scroll below "the fold" (the part of the page that is off the bottom of the screen when first shown), according to Greg Edwards, the CTO of Eyetools, which performed the study with Enquiro. And when Internet searchers return to a search results page, Greg said, they tend to look further down the search results page for more results, with results above the fold still getting a big edge in clicks.

One reason that searchers spend so little time on the search results page is that they click the first thing that looks like the right answer. They are not looking for the best answer-just the first decent answer. This behavior is consistent with studies that show that people often choose information that is easier to get even when it is of lower quality (a basic principle of foraging behavior also.)

But what are they looking for? The words in their query, yes, but that’s not all. Gord describes a particular searcher behavior called "semantic mapping" whereby searchers associate many possible search terms with a concept but enter only one or two words into the search box. For example, a searcher looking for a digital camera thinks about many words (such as reviews, megapixel, Nikon, Canon, Kodak, easy-to-use, reviews, and testimonials) but ends up typing in "digital camera." But those other words are not forgotten. The searcher scans for those words in the search results also, not just the words that were typed. In this way, a #2 result that contains more occurrences of the words in a searcher’s semantic map could attract more clicks than the #1 result.

Most Internet searchers look only at the first page of search results-the top of the first page at that. But Jarvis Mak, Director at Nielsen/NetRatings, notes that as searchers do more and more searches within a session they are far more likely to look at a second page of search results, perhaps even a third page. These are the distinct minority of searches, but it does show that when searchers are intently searching for something they use more queries and view more results pages.

Within each search result, Internet searchers spend 43 percent of the time viewing the snippet (the multi-line description under the title), followed by 30 percent reviewing the title itself, according to that same Cornell study. Why is that important? Good titles and descriptions are the keys to getting searchers to click.

The more you know about searcher behavior, the more you can do to improve your organic search marketing and your Web site search.

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New Enquiro Eye Tracking Study

Manoj Jasra — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 16:18:36 +0000

Enquiro’s original study used eye tracking technology to quantify what user interactions with the Google search results page looked like.

The results were the “Golden Triangle” image which has been discussed extensively. Of course, because the scope of the original study was restricted to Google, that left one big question: What about the other engines?

This new study from Enquiro not only answers that question but attempts to explain some of the differences in search behaviors noticed on Yahoo! and MSN search results pages.

Click Here to read a sample of this new whitepaper!

The Yahoo/MSN whitepaper covers:

How We Scan a Listing

Semantic Mapping

Information Scent

Thin Slicing

Banner Blindness

Growth of Navigational Search

Impact of Bolded Search Queries and Icons

Perceived Relevancy

Golden Section Theory

Portal Entry Success

Interactions with Top Sponsored

Interactions with Side Sponsored

Interactions with Top Organic

Interactions with Bottom Organic

Interactions with Vertical Results

http://www.enquiro.com/eyetrackingreport.asp

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Manoj has been working in the search engine marketing industry since 2002. He started out as a software developer but now provides in-depth web site analysis using web analytics.

http://www.enquiro.com

Manoj is also the author of Web Analytics World. Web Analytics is an essential component in developing a successful
online campaign. Help convert visitors into customers by understanding
them.

Web Analytics World: Celebrity Writer Week

Manoj Jasra — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 17:24:00 +0000

At Web Analytics World, I am very proud to feature Celebrity (guest) writer week.

The guest authors are very well known individuals in the Search Engine Marketing and Web Analytics Industry. Each of them will be contributing with a post on Web Analytics World regarding a topic of their choice.

I’d like to introduce you to our celebrity writers:

Tuesday: Avinash Kaushik – Avinash is the Director of Web Research & Analytics at Intuit Inc. He is responsible for the business, technical and strategic elements of the research & analytics platform that supports decision making for Intuit’s 60+ ecommerce and non-ecommerce websites. Avinash’s offers people a wealth of knowledge through his very popular blog: Occam’s Razor.

Wednesday: Jennifer Laycock – Jennifer is the chief editor of SearchEngineGuide. She has been involved with Internet marketing since 1995 and is regularly featured at the Search Engine Strategies Conference. Her writing has been featured on well known sites such as Search Engine Watch and About.com.

Thursday: Gord Hotchkiss – Gord is currently the chair of SEMPO and is the President/CEO of the SEM firm: Enquiro Search Solutions. You can find Gord speaking at major shows such as: Search Engine Strategies and Webmaster World. Over the last 10 years Gord has established himself as one of the industry leaders in terms organic research and search strategies.

Friday: Rand Fishkin – Rand is the Owner and operator of SEOmoz, the tools, blog, articles and resources therein. He is also the CEO of a Seattle-based SEO company and a frequent speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences.

Avinash will kick start things on Tuesday with his thoughts on why Web Analytics is suddenly so hot.

Bookmark WebProNews:

Manoj has been working in the search engine marketing industry since 2002. He started out as a software developer but now provides in-depth web site analysis using web analytics.

http://www.enquiro.com

Manoj is also the author of Web Analytics World. Web Analytics is an essential component in developing a successful
online campaign. Help convert visitors into customers by understanding
them.

Rogers: Google Should Track Your Eyeballs

WebProNews Staff — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 21:15:44 +0000

ZDNet Google blogger Garett Rogers has suggested an upgrade to Google Analytics, where Google tracks your eye movements by following your mouse around the screen.

In his latest post, Rogers makes a modest proposal of Google and its web analytics efforts.

He reported on Enquiro’s eye-tracking study. That study of 50 people revealed a “Golden Triangle” of attention, focused primarily on the top left side of Google’s organic search results.

Enquiro’s analysis found top-of-page, above-the-fold visibility of organic results had the most visibility to its study subjects. As one moves down the page, the corresponding visibility continues to drop. That reinforces the common belief of search experts that the best place for a site is at the top of the search results, preferably on the first page.

The study also demonstrated the value of those sponsored links that appear above the organic results. Since people’s eyes have been focusing on that area of the page, Rogers thinks it indicates an area where Google could add to the data it delivers with Analytics:

You may wonder how Google could possibly track eye movements of users – it isn’t difficult. People often follow their eyes with their mouse when using a computer – try it yourself. Approximate eye movements are extremely easy to capture with a few lines of Javascript.

Google Analytics already shows where people click on a page with the site overlay, but visually seeing where people look could also be very powerful information.

Maybe some Googler will pick up the gauntlet here and spend some of that fabled 20 percent personal project time on bashing out the Javascript code needed to accomplish this. Then no one’s eyeballs will be entirely theirs anymore.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Googles Golden Triangle

WebProNews Staff — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 22:13:31 +0000

“It’s not the searcher, it’s the engine,” said Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Canadian search engine marketing firm, Enquiro. Hotchkiss, presenting at SES Chicago last week, was relaying some telling eye-tracking data, comparing where users’ eyes fall on major search engines like Google, MSN, and Yahoo. Google, with its “Golden Triangle” eye-tracking pattern, seems to produce results faster than the others.

“Google has trained us how to search. Sorry MSN. Sorry Yahoo,” Hotchkiss continued.

The data suggested that Google’s homepage was set up exactly right. Users’ eyes landed directly on the search box. With busy portals like MSN and Yahoo, eye patterns were more diverse, distracting users with a barrage of imagery. The imagery causes the pattern to scatter as users look around the page between query and result. This is a pattern Hotchkiss called the “accidental tourist.”

Users scan Google’s results page in a triangular pattern now called the Golden Triangle, a shot of which can be found here, from the top left to the top right, connecting to the bottom left just above where searchers begin to scroll. Eyetools reports that in its initial study, 100% of study participants looked at this area of the SERP.

The percentages of users that looked at any given rank, says Eyetools, are as follows:

Rank 1 – 100%
Rank 2 – 100%
Rank 3 – 100%
Rank 4 – 85%
Rank 5 – 60%
Rank 6 – 50%
Rank 7 – 50%
Rank 8 – 30%
Rank 9 – 30%
Rank 10 – 20%

As you might guess, the top three listings on Google’s SERP are prime real estate.

Hotchkiss asserted also that users perceived Google to be more relevant than MSN or Yahoo.

“There really is a Google Effect,” he said. “There is a Google halo effect.”

Google users don’t take much time to scroll down, which may indicate that the top links are trusted or deemed most relevant most often. The bare bones design may have something to do with the scrolling pattern however. At Yahoo, 60-70% scroll down the SERPS, a scattered eye-tracking map that may be indicative of the dominance of sponsored links before a searcher actually sees the organic results farther down the page.