MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

A little while back, Gord Hotchkiss, president and CEO of Enquiro (Canada’s leading search engine marketing firm) spoke in-depth about user behaviour on the results page and compared it to a shopping mall.

He mentioned that in recent eye tracking studies, there are numerous factors that can create barriers or “walls” in these ’shopping malls’, and that can keep traffic from ever finding your listing.

Firstly, Gord discusses the traffic flow and how it runs through these search “malls”. People enter in on the upper left of the page and scan down four or five results. This area (of results) is where these people will hang out, explore and compare. They then either click on a result, continue scanning elsewhere on the page, or relaunch their search.

People want fewer, more relevant choices, and they will make their decision on the overall importance of the results (all pages), based on the results in that initially identified area. If 3 or 4 results are highly relevant, that reinforces the overall quality of all the results. Therefore, if there are few or no relevant results in this area, they are most likely to write off the entire results set and make another search.

The problem lies in the idea that if your result is relevant and the rest of the results are not, you have less of a chance of getting that person to your site than if you and a few other guys of high relevance are sitting at the top of that page.

The human mind likes to organise information into groups, whereas the human eye can quickly determine similarity or discrepancy in results. The manner in which the mind scans the results depends on where they are located on the page. Sponsored results at the top are automatically grouped together, as are the ads on the right hand side. The first 3 or 4 organic results are grouped together. And so goes the rest of the results page.

People inadvertently spend most of their time scanning areas where they find the best results. The right rail and further down the page is less frequent. What people may do, however, is compare these rail ads to the top listings, but will still go back to the top organic.

The division of the page may assemble the first set of walls. Then we go and subdivide the page into sections - top ads, organic results, right rail ads, and then mentally we build further walls to separate them. People may pass through the walls once, but when they have made that leap, they tend not to go back again.

Gord then discusses how thumbnails (video or images), graphics and background boxes (even subtle thin lines) create further walls. He mentions how he noticed a rather remarkable effect in the eye tracking tests that they (Universal results on Google) ran recently, and how this may restrict scanning down the page beyond the graphic.

The most interesting result from the eye tracking study was the one he did on how “non-relevant results can create walls in any further scanning on a page.” The example given is Wikipedia. Google loves Wikipedia and appears to give an incredible amount of preference to them for all kinds of varied searches. So if as a user, this is not the info you are actually looking for, it tends to act as a deterrent, and people start to get irritated and stop scanning the rest of the page.

Of course, the intent here is key. If the person is looking for information about something, then a Wikipedia result is not that harmless. The problem comes in when the intent is commercial and the person is looking to buy something or is searching for specific information about a product or service. If that’s the case and Wikipedia comes up top of the SEPS, you going to get annoyed. This page will be doomed as the rest of that group will be deemed irrelevant and more often than not, that person will leave the page to go refine their search.

In conclusion, these “walls” on the Search Results Page do impact on peoples’ scanning behaviour. Eye tracking test results prove to be insightful tools into this behaviour. It’s therefore important to plan and manage all your strategies (paid and organic) carefully, especially if your specific search terms tend to attract universal results.