User behavior in SERPs. Eye tracking study July 2010

Thank you very much for translating the highlights of this study into English, Ani.

I've been hoping to see some data about the differences between different types of query intents using an eyetracking study for a while, and the variation in attention between different parts of an individual search result do fit what I was thinking they might - but it's terrific to see information backing those assumptions.

Thanks Bill,
Credit goes to the authors, I just exported their work outside the borders of our country.

Thanks for sharing. This is great - I passed it on to a client or two.

Love the text above this comment box by the way - haha. :)

Thanks for this! So don't forget to use meta description for popular searches.

Interesting research!

PS. Its a pity that you presume that all users on the Internet are male!

Thanks so much for translating this, these sort of heat maps are great for showing clients the difference that additional rank can make!

Great article... one piece I am wondering about.

The transactional eye tracking piece (the far right two images) looks like a local search, and clearly almost all of the attention is on the paid search ads, and yet the findings say the focus is on organic. Am I missing something here? This finding and oversight seems pretty significant.

Excellent summary of a truly interesting study. It is definitely good to see a scientific study on SEO. I wish we had more research like this being published online.

I would also like to echo Ryan's above question on PPC ads. Was this piece of the study relating to something else (e.g.: importance/role of PPC ad copy)?

User Centric conducted a similar eye tracking study focused exclusively on the PPC Ads and the importance of the display URL. A summary article was published by at
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/do-not-overlook-the-importance-of-the-display-urls-in-ppc-ads

Thanks for translating this article. Fascinating to see eye tracking data on how intent influences fixations.

Hi Ani, thanks for taking the time to do this, I'm working on getting rich snippets into the index and also concentrating efforts generally to improving snippets for an ecommerce site. It's great to have real data I can show clients to prove the work is worth the development time, and eye tracking studies are like gold dust.

Big thanks for taking the time to translate this Ani. It's a great look inside one of the most important factors we should watch. You nailed it when you said professional SEO's already know the value of this item, but this type of work (and your effort in translating

@Peter: I don't think the authors of the study presume all Internet users are male in fact people participating were more women 57% than men 43%, if this is what you are talking about.

@Ryan Mull and @Geno Prussakov: You are right saying that for transactional, heatmap/gazeplot seems to indicate PPC is getting more attention than organic while in text/stats it says the opposite. I'll ask the authors about.

Thanks everybody for come and comment, I hope you enjoy the rest of the articles.

very intresting article.

Nice data to use for SEO and SEM.

Genial Ani, gracias por acercar este genial estudio al mundo, y arriba en Sphinn , eres un crack :)

A very interesting study, thanks for translating from the spanish version.

This is a great study and will be helpful to many professional in the SEO field! And I agree, i see a lot of attention on paid search part of the results. Makes sense since that's where Google is making their money.

I think this data, though interesting, can easily be misinterpreted. A snippet has more text in it than a title. Therefore, people will probably spend more time looking at a snippet merely due to allocation of screen real estate rather than genuine interest.

That is a core problem with eyetracking studies - a study might tell you how people look at things, but not why they look at things.

They might look at things because they are distracted from completing a task. And they might look at something due to genuine interest. Again, the "why" part is extremely important.

Oh, and one more thing. I hope that people do not overgeneralize this study.

People from different countries, and even from different regions of the same country, look at elements on web pages differently.

Microsoft has done some incredible work on eyetracking, and their data does not match this data. It might be due to the fact that test participants were located in different geographic regions.

Again, everyone, please keep this in perspective. It is very easy to overgeneralize, and misinterpret, eyetracking data.

@Shari Thurow interesting notes.
"A snippet has more text in it than a title" right but a title has a bigger text size and different color compensating that.

Do you have any link to the Microsoft study you mentioned? It would not surprise me their conclusions not matching these ones, Microsoft does not match nothing rational :)

You are right preventing not to overgeneralize but what's your take on it?

Thanks to everybody for these useful comments, we'll take them into account for the following study (we are working hard)

@Peter: "you presume that all users on the Internet are male!": As Ani has answered, we have almost 50% of each genre, and aged from 18 to 61

@Ani @Ryan Mull and @Geno Prussakov. About "for transactional, heatmap/gazeplot seems to indicate PPC is getting more attention than organic while in text/stats it says the opposite": the maps chosen to show are just an example of some maps we have collected, they don't fit exactly to the data but can represent in some way what we have found. Please, take them just as an example, not to generalize

@shari: About "A snippet has more text in it than a title. Therefore, people will probably spend more time looking at a snippet merely due to allocation of screen real estate rather than genuine interest": we say the same in the conclusions in the original paper, but we consider that the data are valid because even the snippet is longer than the title, the title has a bigger font and a blue color, so it is more probable for people to look at the title. If we consider length we should consider other variables, and it is not possible to measure them

@Shari: I agree, this study have been run in Spain and should be run in other region to generalize

Thanks everybody, and especially to Ani!

This was a big issue on the news. I seen it and was talking it out with my partner. Lets see what happens!

http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/70395/tr-2007-01.pdf
link to the research - Microsoft eye tracking for web search which shows the significance of the search result optimization and user action on the search results.

hi
Very interesting exp.
I have been studying the psychology of perception

questions about this 1. How did you intend category? info.. navi.. transac.. multi.. Are there any standards?

it be.. Can u tell me about the intent category standards?
2. Except for the results, what can i get other eye movement data?
wait ur email or reply.. thank u so much

Studies that I have been involved with show that users attach a higher weighting to the title compared to the snippet. But this can still be compatible with the conclusions of this study i.e. while the user spends longer reading the snippet compared to the title (because it contains more text), they may still attach a higher weighting to the title. One reason for the length of time viewing the snippet may be because the autogenerated snippet is difficult to interpret, for instance!
However, a very useful study.

Nice data to use for SEO and SEM. Interesting points on local vs paid and the moment of consumers.

Hi again-

Many people know users/searchers look at the title in the snippet due to the fact that the title is the hypertext link in the snippet and also tends to have more text in it than other links on a search engine results page (SERP). With all due respect... that is a "duh" (obvious) observation.

I do not think you should discount Microsoft's eye-tracking research because you simply do not like them. That is not a very objective, scientific point of view.

I appreciate that you did a lot of work for this test. But I also understand that eye-tracking is tricky, and the mind-eye hypothesis is highly questionable...it is a hypothesis after all.

People pay attention to items with peripheral vision, too. Based on how questions were presented, people look at different areas of the screen. And the query words? "barcelona restaurant" isn't necessarily a transactional keyword phrase. The hours for the Louvre can be found on other sites than the official Louvre website...but the word "Louvre" can also indicate navigational intent.

I'm sorry if I respectfully feel that this research, and conclusions, are overgeneralized in some places and obvious in other places. And some of these conclusions might be incorrect.

Dear Shari,
First I would like to mention that I follow your posts and respect you as professional. I would not like you bother for what or how I expressed myself. Said that let me go deep in my comments.

"Many people know users/searchers look at the title in the snippet due to the fact that the title is the hypertext link in the snippet" Fine to me but that is the purpose of these studies, bring some facts and figures to our subjective assumptions.

Some studies are not 100% accurate, some others only applicable under certain circumstances depending how they were made and, although you are 110% right saying they can be misinterpreted, I'll allays put more credibility on facts, figures and evidences.

What I said about Microsoft's eye-tracking research was a bad joke. Those around here know I'm a open-source minded guy. Anyway, any study deserves respect if done to discover the reality besides opinions.

I did a very few work for the test, nothing in fact, just summarize and translate and do not feel offended by your comments but, to be honest, knowing the professional you are I was expecting something more from you than just a "do not misinterpret". Yes, some of these conclusions might be incorrect. Please, bring these errors to the surface, that would be much more helpful.

Now you are explaining better your point of view, don't feel sorry about that at all, I'm sure it is going to be very interesting to the authors to improve next studies in that field.

Ironic, all this Google Instant thing seems is going to turn upside down this particular discussion.
From a UX perspective I hate it but that's another story.

First of thanks to those who did all the hard work putting together and executing this study. Also, thank you for translating. It is very nice to have data to back up gut feelings and subjective opinions.

At User First, we found this study to be a great example of how eye tracking can be used to fill in gaps in knowledge available from other UX techniques such as analytics (getting us closer to Shari's "why"). We weren't as concerned with weighing the implications for SEO ourselves as we are interested in this study as a practical demonstration of eye tracking's unique value. You can read more of our thoughts on our post on our blog below.

http://www.userfirst.com/our-blog/2010/10/15/eye-tracking-study-analyzes-serps/

Ani, we appreciate you translating and summarizing this study for the English-reading world. And, of course, thanks to the actual researchers too!

Hi John
Thanks for your kind words, I'm glad you found it useful.
I appreciate any take on this study.

Great study of Mari Carmen Marcos and Cristina González Caro, thanks! And thanks to you, Ani for sharing the "highlights" in english.

I have been studying user-behavior for more than 10 years know, first mostly at the websites and later from a user-holistic point of view, especially search behavior. (And years before "online", of course...)

We have to get closer and closer to the users needs to understand why they do as the do - and why not. It is not good enough to check Bounce Rates/one page/10 sec-behavior on the SERPS (or the website). After 10 sec. the user allready are going on with the task. Therefore - great to see a study that went that close - secounds and millisecound.... :-)

Henrik, Denmark

Hi Henrik, thanks for come and comment.
This kind of studies are more and more important every day specially since search engines are going wild lately with so many changes.

Thank-you for doing this! I am very excited to find updated eye tracking information (especially something with Google Maps and other universal search results).

Some great points with your stats on tracking. I'm just starting to get to that point, but have a bit to go with translating the stats.

It's amazing to see search change overtime. The eye-tracking information you provided is great and so useful in light of blended search. You almost need to do a study every month as Google continues to change the location of at least one aspect of the SERPs. I would love to see the eye-tracking data compared with the latest Click through study mentioned here - http://www.local-business-marketing-specialists.com/blog/the-latest-greatest-google-click-through-rates-for-the-serps/.
Be interesting to see of we can determine where the nearly 50% of clicks are going that aren't going to the organic results. I think we'd be able to determine some good general percentages given where the eye-tracking data hits.

Thanks again for your post.