Eye tracking study of Google Maps proves the use of social search
Mediative, the company formerly known under the name Enquiro recently conducted an eye-tracking and click-tracking study for users of Google Maps that will be of considerable interest to all the SEO companies out there. The study aimed at finding out how users typically interact with the service and studied this by tasking the participants to search for a place to get tattoos in four cities across Canada. The experiment involved 12 participants taking part using the eye-tracking method and 90 participants being monitored using the click-tracking method. 12 participants is a little low for a conclusive result I would have thought, but let’s just presume that the results would largely remain the same and move on. As I am sure if any of you are internet marketing experts you will likely be able to guess that the results indicated that users interacted with Google Maps in much the same fashion as they do with the search results pages. Users largely followed the “F” shape pattern of looking towards to the top left, then moving across to the right before moving down, with each result getting less and less attention. This area of interest in the top left corner is often termed the “Golden triangle”. The interesting part of the study especially to SEO companies was when users came to search for a tattoo place in London, Ontario. When the search results were shown, the top two listings only contained the URL and some contact information for each business. The third result down however, showed a rating score taken from a number of reviews and a snippet from one of those reviews displayed below. When faced with this choice, the participants responded by clicking the third result significantly more often than in the previous searches even though it was only rated 3 stars, making it comparable to the top result. Thus indicating that social search has a clear impact people’s decision of which link to follow, perhaps this is down to an increased sense of trust they receive from seeing others opinions. So for you budding internet marketing experts out there, if you are hoping to get traffic from Google Maps what conclusion can you draw from this study? Well you must firstly remember that the eye-tracking portion of the experiment was only carried out by 12 people, hardly enough to call it scientifically significant. That doesn’t mean this study should be disregarded, just bare that fact in mind. The results clearly show the positive impact of social signals when searching. When the top results have very little signals, it is more likely that one below that does will receive more attention. So what you should think about when submitting your business is that if your company is not listed at the top in your area and you do not include any type of social content than you are likely to be relatively ignored.