Eye Tracking and SEO vs PPC

March 6th, 2009 // 11:10 am @ Fox

According to Wikipedia:

Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (“where we are looking”) or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movements.

How can understanding eye tracking help the marketing effort?

Studies have been undertaken using eye tracking to determine how a user interacts with web pages and with search engines. The screenshot below shows a search engine results page with the darker colour where the eyes spend the most amount of time. The shape of these ‘hot spots’ is commonly termed the ‘golden triangle’.

With the user’s focus on the golden triangle, this is the place in search results where we would all like to be.

What happens to the golden triangle when we add paid advertising (PPC) to the mix?

Rand from SEOmoz has a very good post on The disconnect in PPC vs SEO spending,where he concludes that organic search drives approximately 75% of search traffic and PPC drives around 25% of search traffic, yet PPC makes up 80% of the marketing budget and SEO around 15%.

The value of SEO is quite apparent when viewing the eye tracking images above, however the value lies in being in the top 6 positions on a search results page. If you are able to achieve these top rankings then you could reasonably expect to attract a great percentage of the search traffic for your keywords.

Rand questions the logic of spending so much on PPC when SEO results are so much higher. In competitive markets it is more difficult to achieve this top ranking so many companies turn to the easy and fast solution to reach the top of the tree.

I also feel that the search behaviour of the user differs depending on what they are looking for. If I am looking to purchase a product or service then I am more likely to view the PPC ads down the right hand side of the page, whereas if I am looking for information or just ‘surfing’ then I rarely glance at the PPC ads.

Achieving a top placing in organic search results can often take time. It rarely happens overnight and rarely for a new website.

Plan A: Have a top 5 placing in organic search results
Plan B: Put a long-term plan into action to be in the top organic search results and as a short-term strategy, have one of the top placings in PPC.

Category : Eye Tracking &blog