How people search
Categories: Marketing
Written By: Edward
In 2005 three landmark search eye-tracking studies were conducted. Search engine marketing firm Enquiro ran the first tests on Google specifically, then MarketingSherpa’s research team followed up with comparative tests on other major search engines such as MSN and Yahoo!. MarketingSherpa then also conducted a study of major shopping engines such as Shopping.com.
It turns out that when your customers and prospects search on Google, Yahoo!, or any other engine, their eyes view the results screen in a predictable series of involuntary reactions. Eye-tracking lab tests can predict what most people’s eyes will do when they look at search results. You can learn if your ad copy will catch attention (or not). You can also discover how your position on the results page will catch attention. (Do you need to be the first ad on the page, or is it okay to be farther down?)
Plus, you can discover how consumers view paid listings (such as the PPC ads run on Google) vs. the way they view the organic listings (the editorial results that show up without a direct cost to the marketer).
MarketingSherpa highlight these as the top five research results:
- Searchers have an incredibly short attention span: 0.7 seconds
- Copywriting really matters
- Organic listings are far more important than paid listings
- Multiple listings improve results
- Almost no searchers look at the right side of the page (some surveys suggest only 1 in 5)
