What will be the distribution of clicks on the search engine outcomes page? What percentage of clicks will get every research consequence according to its rank? How much more users’ attention gets the first listing in comparison with the 2nd? Or how frequently do consumers click the listing below the page fold? The way in which end users interact with SERPs is one of the most regularly talked about topics within the Search engine optimization neighborhood and is also also a really critical subject of research for your internet search engine experts. To solution the previously mentioned questions researchers use the so-called eye tracking experiments.
Eye-Tracking Research
The goal of eye tracking research is gaining insight into how customers browse the presented abstracts and pick hyperlinks to click. The results of eye tracking research present Web entrepreneurs with details on clickthrough charges, therefore permitting them to create correct predictions on visitors adjustments as their rankings are gained or lost. For SE engineers the results offer a basis for improving the interfaces of search engines and metrics to assess the relevancy from the offered search results.
To detect users’ interaction patterns the eye monitoring experiment observes a number of indicators of ocular behavior using a CCD (charged couple system) camera comparable to the appliance utilised to read bar codes. The indices of ocular behavior incorporate eye fixations, saccades, scan paths and pupil dilation. Eye fixations are defined like a stable gaze lasting for 200-300 milliseconds representing visual attention to a distinct area of the SERP. Pupil dilations or pupil diameter modifications represent a measurement of curiosity in a particular listing. This variable is specially essential because it assists interpreting an implicit user feedback to the relevancy of the introduced search results.
Cornell University Eye-Tracking Analysis of SE Users’ Behavior
One of one of the most recent eye tracking research was performed at Cornell University by Laura A. Granka, Thorsten Joachims and Geri Cay ([1]). They employed a sample of undergraduate students instructed to perform research in Google for 397 queries o topics covering movies, travel,
Office Home And Student MicrosoftOffice Microsoft Office, music, politics, local and trivia. This research has produced the following outcomes.
Fig 1. Google SEPR Click on and Interest distribution ‘heat-map’
Study Outcomes: Clicks and Interest Distribution
As you can see through the graph below and a SERP ‘heat-map’ according to it, the very first two listings capture over a half with the user’s attention in terms of time with the eye fixation. Whereas the interest is shared almost equally, the difference in quantity of click between the very first two listings is much more surprising: over four times! After the second listing the eye fixation drops sharply. Research outcomes amount 6 to 10 receive roughly equal interest. Here an interesting thing is that the 7th listing gets less interest than the succeeding 8th – apparently here we can observe the effect of the page fold. The 7th listing is just beneath the screen edge and it is often skipped as consumers scroll the page down to the bottom (during the examine the 7th listing was clicked only once). On the graph you can also see the 11th listing from your second page from the lookup results. It gets only about 1 percent of clicks and user interest – 2.5 times less than the lowest ranked consequence on the page one.
Fig 2. Time spent on viewing each results in comparison with the number of clicks. Source [1]
Often people consider getting to the ‘top-ten’ of Google being a measurement of the Search engine optimization success. Evidently this is a rather rough approximation. The ‘top-ten’ itself is a extremely diverse group with the quantity of clicks increasing almost logarithmically as your rank grows. For instance,
Buy Windows 7 Enterprise, the very first five positions get over 88% from the visitors, and the first three – 79%.
SERP Browsing Patterns
Another critical outcome of this study will be the discovery from the browsing pattern: the way people read a SEPR. To assess the performance of the lookup algorithm it is vital to know how customers examine the presented abstracts before clicking 1 of them. For example, if a user clicks the third listing, did he look the abstracts over and beneath it? The following figure shows how many results above and below of the selected listing are scanned on average.
Fig.3 Quantity of outcomes scanned previously mentioned and below the selected abstract. Source [1]
The effect of the page fold is clearly demonstrated here as well. While the first 5 listings are clicked after browsing through 1 to 2.68 listings above and below, the 7th listing is clicked after the entire page is examined! The listings below the page fold (8-10) are clicked after the very first five or four listings are scanned. You can also see that the number of listings scanned above the clicked result is much bigger than the number of listings beneath. This indicates that end users browse the list from top to bottom.
To Sum Up
While the examine deals only with the very first page with the organic search outcomes, it can be assumed that comparable outcomes can be produced for other pages and perhaps even for that list of the paid ads inside the proper sidebar.
In addition for the academic researches there is several companies producing eye-tracking studies for the commercial use. The most notable of them are Eyetools.com and Poynterextra (
References:
1. Laura A. Granka, Thorsten Joachims, Geri Gay. ‘Eye-tracking evaluation of consumer behavior in WWW search’, SIGIR, 2004. Available at Retrieved on 26.10.06