4Front Marketing

The average searcher on Google spends less than 7 seconds looking at search engine results before making a click decision. So where exactly are people looking when on a search engine results page? The answers to this is necessary for planning online advertising campaigns.

 
The official Google Blog had the following comments to make.

Based on eye-tracking studies, we know that people tend to scan the search results in order. They start from the first result and continue down the list until they find a result they consider helpful and click it — or until they decide to refine their query. The heatmap below shows the activity of 34 usability study participants scanning a typical Google results page. The darker the pattern, the more time they spent looking at that part of the page. This pattern suggests that the order in which Google returned the results was successful; most users found what they were looking for among the first two results and they never needed to go further down the page.

What can we conclude from the above?

The top 2 positions on the Google results page are where the most heat and clicks will result. Also notice how the heat is on the left hand side and not on the right, which could be a condition of our western culture where we read from top left to right. It would be very interesting to see these studies on Chinese and other Asian based search engines. (Maybe we will try and find some of these in a future article.)

 
The left hand side of these results is what Google and search engine professionals call the Natural or Organic results. The adverts that occupy the right hand side are called pay per click adverts (PPC) which Google calls Adwords. However as much as we as 4Fronters love how pay per click brings immediate clicks to website properties what we are seeing here is that the real value is in optimising the natural search engine results to get the most clicks.

 
We don’t recommend abandoning Adwords, but just bear in mind that the best combination to get the most clicks is both a focus on pay per click and natural search engine results in the long term.