Archive March 2008
The Eyes have it
Here’s an interesting article about the eye movements of users who are just searching for information vs those who are looking to buy online.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first thing the researchers found was that users who were looking to buy spent more time absorbing information and looking through more pages of results than those who were looking for info only.
Nothing particularly new here, but what makes it more interesting is the following conclusions:
- Familiarity: keywords which refer to a brand are a strong motivating factor to induce a click-through;
- Succinct: copy in your search results has to be accurate and to the point, preferably with a call-to-action. Consumers will be ready to trawl more results to find what they want, so be concise;
- Paid ads need to be written in such a way as to mimick natural search results: users tended not to spend as much time looking at the paid results as they did the natural entries.
Read more here:
http://www.checkit.nl/pdf/eyetracking_research.pdf