Search Behavior Session a Marketer's Gold Mine
Search is, of course, a very prominent theme at AD:TECH this year. And, I was particularly interested to hear panelists Greg Edwards of EyeTools, Akhilesh Bajaj of University of Tulsa, Jarvis Mak of Nielsen/NetRatings, and Moderator Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro discuss the results of their recent studies.
Greg Edwards started the session with a fascinating study measuring what people actually see when searching on Google. Using an eye tracking technology that identifies what visitors view on screen they created "heat maps" of visual activity. The results of their study (due out in May) have identified a "Golden Triangle" of visual activity in the upper left corner of the search results page. Now, this might not suprise search marketers, we know click-throughs are heavily weighted to the first results, but the details are fascinating. For instance, they found:
- Searchers will view the title and description of the first left side listing, but more frequently only the titles of the next 3-4 listings.
- After searching on the Google homepage the user's view is focused on the search box and that position is a visual hotspot on the results page.
- More discouragingly, a much lower percent of searchers view the right side sponsored results in the range of 20-40%. And, even return page visitors, those who have clicked a result and later returned still do not often view the right side.
In the next study Professor Bajaj looked into the relative importance of various factors in a motivating a search click. The factors studied included:
- The degree to which the title matched the search scenario.
- The order of appearance in results.
- The reputation of the display URL.
- The degree to which the description matches the search scenario.
He found that Title was the most dominant influencer, accounting for 50% of the decision space. Next, was listing description with another 30%. So, the actual listing copy accounts for 80% of the click descision space in their study. Order, was actually much less, only 15%. So, why is it that the top results often get the clicks. According to Akhilesh it is because the search results themselves are highly ordered based on title and description. Often the first listings are the most closely matched in terms of title and description.
To wrap up the session, Jarvis Max of Nielsen/NetRatings shared results from their Mega Panel which generates very large amounts of consumer purchase decision data.
He has found that search-originated visits vary significantly by site category. Government and Mass Merchants see the highest percentage of visits originated from search, nearly 45%. They've also determined that more than 50% of all searchers view just one page of results in a single search session. But, those that do perform multiple searches will more frequently view multiple pages of the search results. After 3 searches, a majority of searches will view multiple pages o f search results.
A key take away from Mak's presentation is the need to focus on the top quintile of online spenders. According to their research the top 20% of online customers account for 76% of online purchases in terms of dollar value. In non-holiday periods this goes up to 90%. The bad news is, this top quintile does not actually search more often than the others. So, we'll have to be more creative in our approaches to build and maintain our relationships with these key individuals.
You can take a look at the "Golden Triangle" here:
http://www.enquiro.com/eye-tracking-pr.asp
And, for a discount on the finished study visit the Enquiro site
