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SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING: TOP FIVE EYE-TRACKING LABORATORY TEST RESULTS

Anne Holland, MarketingSherpa

In my last column, you discovered the results of MarketingSherpa's lab tests on how the human eye really sees e-mail marketing campaigns. This week I'm going to reveal the results of more eye-tracking lab tests: how the human eye sees search engine marketing.

In 2005 three landmark search eye-tracking studies were conducted. Search engine marketing firm Enquiro ran the first tests on Google specifically, then MarketingSherpa's research team followed up with comparative tests on other major search engines such as MSN and Yahoo!. We also conducted a study of major shopping engines such as Shopping.com.

Turns out that when your customers and prospects search on Google, Yahoo!, or any other engine, their eyes view the results screen in a predictable series of involuntary reactions.

That's right--eye-tracking lab tests can predict what most people's eyes will do when they look at search results. You can learn if your ad copy will catch attention (or not). You can also discover how your position on the results page will catch attention. (Do you need to be the first ad on the page, or is it okay to be farther down?)

Plus, you can discover how consumers view paid listings (such as the PPC ads you can run on Google) vs. the way they review the organic listings (the editorial results that show up without cost to the marketer).

Here are five of the top-line research discoveries from the studies (also see below for a link for more details):

1) Incredibly short attention span: 0.7 seconds:

As you probably guessed, no searcher looks at every single search result on a page. People's eyes skitter around seeking the most interesting and relevant listings and ads to read. For us the shocking discovery was how little time a searcher actually spent looking at an ad or listing once he decided to actually focus on it.

Two-thirds of the consumers studied looked at a typical result for only 0.7 seconds (that's less than an entire second). Search results are generally very short--perhaps 20 words in all including headline, body copy, and click link. But even at that length, it would take more than 0.7 seconds to read all that copy properly.

Doesn't matter -- consumers don't both reading the copy properly. They don't read every word you've written. They make click or not-click decisions on a microsecond's worth of reading time.

2) Copywriting really matters:

Since you have only that microsecond of time, copywriting search marketing ads may be one of the most challenging copy assignments on the planet. A 15-second TV spot is insanely luxurious by comparison.

MarketingSherpa has gathered anecdotal data about what's worth testing for your search ad copywriting from our case studies of real-life campaigns. In addition to displaying the actual search term in your headline (something so many marketers are doing now that it may lose effectiveness in 2006) best copy tactics to test include:

- Use of bold
- Words and capitalization within your visible click link
- Displaying actual prices
- Featuring a phone number
- Writing in keyword phrases rather than sentences

3) The role of organic vs. paid listings:

If you think you're covered because you have a paid ad (PPC listing) in a search engine for a search term that's important to your business, think again. Organic results (free listings) are far more important and can get more viewership and clicks.

Experienced search marketers have known this for years. That's why if their search budget is limited, they focus first on gaining the best organic listings they can for a wide range of targeted key terms. Mainstream marketers, however, are only now starting to catch on. This partially explains why marketers spent $5.5 billion on paid listings in 2005 compared with just $660 million on optimization for organic listings.

MarketingSherpa's research team expects to see optimization crack $1 billion at long last in 2006.

4) Multiple listings improve results:

Eye-tracking data revealed that if you show up in just one place on a results page, your campaign may not be truly effective.

That's because people's eyes are skimming results so quickly that if they don't see your one listing, you won't get a second chance. Plus, not everyone reads and clicks on search results in the same way. In fact, there are five specific patterns consumers tend to use depending on where they are in the sales/educational cycle:

- The Quick Click
- The Linear Scan
- The Golden Triangle Scan
- The Deliberate Scan
- The Pickup Search

5) Only shopping engines get right-column attention:

Consumers tend to view different search engines' results in slightly different ways. which makes sense because every search engine lays out results in a slightly different format. That said, one factor applied across the board for major search engines: Almost no searchers look at the right side of the page.

This result is of critical concern to search engine advertisers because the vast majority of paid ads appear in that far right column on most engines. Again this points out the need for you to be in the organic listings (which are on the left side of the page) and for you to never rely on a right-side ad alone to catch attention on the search terms most important for your business.

Interestingly, although we hadn't expected to see a big difference between shopping engine eye-tracking lab results and traditional search engine eye-tracking results, it turns out that for shopping engines the right column is different. Most consumers still spend most of their eye time on the left column. A significant number of them, however, also view the top right column results on shopping search.

Why? It may be because consumers using shopping engines are in a different stage of the buying cycle. They may be slightly more serious about evaluating the results on the page, so they're willing to look harder. It may also be due to the way shopping engines such as Shopzilla and NexTag lay out their results page.

No matter the reason, the results data (presented in colorful eye-tracking "heat maps") is fascinating.

GOOGLE PAYING $1 BILLION FOR AOL STAKE

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Google Inc. and America Online Inc. have expanded their search and advertising alliance to include video and instant messaging, shutting out Microsoft Corp., which had fought hard for a deal with Time Warner Inc.'s AOL unit.

Google will also invest $1 billion for a 5 percent stake in AOL.

America Online said Tuesday that Google had agreed to the investment, as part of an enhanced agreement where Google will move beyond text-based advertising to allow AOL to sell graphical ads to Google's fast-growing ad network.

The stake effectively values AOL at $20 billion, a key benchmark should Time Warner elect to spinoff or sell a part of its Internet unit in response to dissident shareholder Carl Icahn's proxy campaign to break up the company.

Time Warner is the parent company of CNN.com.

Terms of the deal call for AOL to make more of its Web sites searchable via Google search, including a plan to feature AOL's premium video services within Google Video, a way of searching for Web-based video programming.

The two companies also said they had agreed, under certain unspecified conditions, to allow users of Google's recently introduced instant messaging system Google Talk to communicate with users of AOL's market-leading AIM instant messaging service.

Ahead of the announcement, analysts called the new agreement a major defensive win for Web search leader Google, depriving Microsoft of a major customer that would have jump-started its push to compete with Google in the online ad services market.

In a letter to Time Warner's board of directors released Monday, billionaire investor Icahn labeled the potential AOL-Google deal as "disastrous" because it may rule out potential future deals AOL might do with Google rivals such as eBay Inc. or Microsoft.

Shares of Google edged lower in after-hours trade on the Nasdaq Tuesday after closing at $429.74. Time Warner shares edged higher after the bell after closing over 1 percent higher at $17.74 on the New York Stock Exchange.

In an announcement released by the two companies Tuesday, Time Warner Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dick Parsons said: "We're very pleased to build significantly on our special relationship with Google in a way that will meaningfully strengthen AOL's position in the fast-growing online advertising business and help drive more advertisers to its Web properties.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt described AOL as "one of Google's longest-standing partners."

"We are thrilled to strengthen and expand our relationship," he said.

Parsons said the agreement would help realize the potential of AOL's large online audience.

"As digital technologies continue to drive industries together, the great value and opportunity inherent in Time Warner's structure and array of premier businesses becomes increasingly clear. A critical piece of this strategic alliance will be our content, which we will be making more accessible to Google users," Parsons said.

Google, founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, is the global leader in search technologies.

AOL operates the largest Internet access subscription service in the United States.

HOTWIRING YOUR SEARCH ENGINE

Brad Stone, Newsweek

Three years ago, the web site of Oppedisano's Bootery, an 81-year-old shoe store in the amiable upstate village of Honeoye Falls, N.Y., was receiving a scant 100 visitors a week. Then the owners hired a Seattle consultant named Rand Fishkin, who performed an obscure procedure called a "search-engine optimization." Fishkin built a new, easy-to-use Web store at a new address, shoe-store.net, and rewrote the shoe descriptions so that they were clearly visible to the Web's major search engines, which scour the Internet and index its content. Since the search engines measure links as an indication of popularity, Fishkin also peppered online bulletin boards and shoe-enthusiast Web sites with links to his client's site. It worked. Today, when someone searches online for Santana Helen boots or Dansko Montego loafers, the site comes out ahead of thousands of other shoe stores on the Web. "I don't know much about this whole SEO thing," says co-owner Korey Buzzell, who makes three times more money online than in the store. "All I know is that we're in good hands."

If search-engine rankings are supposed to represent a kind of democracy—a reflection of what Internet users collectively think is most useful—then search-engine optimizers like Fishkin are the Web's lobbyists. High-priced and in some cases slyly unethical, SEOs try to manipulate the unpaid search results that help users navigate the Internet. Their goal is to boost their clients' (and in some cases their own) sites to the top of unpaid search-engine rankings—even if their true popularity doesn't warrant that elevated status.

As online shopping grows, search-engine rankings can make a difference between success and failure on the Internet. This holiday season, 10.8 percent of shoppers will find their way to online retailers via Google alone, according to research firm Hitwise. And SEO firm Enquiro reports that the links on the very top of a search-results page—what users see without scrolling down—capture 70 percent of all users' mouseclicks. That's why the SEO profession has taken off, from a few hundred practitioners in the mid-'90s to thousands today, with many of them working inside big firms like Intel and IBM. "Having an SEO either in-house or as a consult-ant is now considered a necessity," says Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, who notes that the companies are partly motivated by keeping their critics off all relevant search-results pages.

Search engines like google, Yahoo and MSN have a conflicted relationship with SEOs. They deplore the so-called black-hat SEOs who use unsavory techniques, like spamming the Web with dummy pages full of links, in an effort to make their sites appear popular. But they are increasingly tolerant of ethical or "white hat" SEOs like Fishkin, who primarily help their clients knock down the virtual walls that prevent search engines from fully indexing their site. Earlier this year Google engineer Matt Cutts started a blog directed at the SEO community, dispensing tips on how to make sites more visible to the automated software "spiders" that catalog the Web. It's good for Google and SEOs: better-organized sites increase the amount of content in Google's index, while improving SEO rankings.

But black-hat SEOs take an altogether different approach. Instead of working for clients, they generally attempt to propel their own ad-packed sites up to the top of the rankings, so they can capture searchers and get them to click on revenue-generating ad links. One British black-hat SEO who goes by the online handle Earl Grey, but requested that his real name not be used because he could be harassed by anti-spam vigilantes, showed NEWSWEEK one of his tricks. Using an illicit software program he downloaded from the Net, he forcibly injected a link to his own private-detectives referral site onto the site of Long Island's Stony Brook University. Most search engines give a higher value to a link on a reputable university site. As of last week, Grey's site ranked fourth on Yahoo and first on MSN for the search term "private detectives." (Google, which moves more cautiously, can take up to a year to rank new sites.) If his detective site gets booted off the search engines, Grey will simply move on to another project. "I'm not very professional,'' he says. "I do what I need to do to get where I need to be."

White-hat SEOs largely steer clear of these tactics and often take a more scholarly approach. Fishkin, for example, studies each Google patent application and search-algorithm upgrade. "If you don't understand how search engines work, you can't do a great job of optimizing a Web site," he says. He posts his findings to his ad-sponsored Web site, seomoz.org, which draws lots of links and thus itself has high rankings. But even he occasionally strays into "gray" territory. For example, for clients such as Seattle loan company Avatar Financial, Fishkin pays Internet ad companies to display text links across a network of sites such as The Miami Herald, betting that major search engines misinterpret these ad links as legitimate measures of popularity. Search engines say they are working on ways to discount these SEO shortcuts.

But for now, such tactics appear to work. Avatar Financial ranked seventh on Google last fall for its key search term "hard money loan,'' a type of commercial mortgage. Then last month Google upgraded its search algorithm with a software update it called Jagger, a secretive scrambling of the variables it uses to rank sites. Avatar fell to page two of search results, eliciting cries of anguish from Fishkin's client. But by last week he had restored it to the second spot on Google's results, partially by increasing the number of links to the site on other financial Web sites. His clients were happy, and their rivals were probably out shopping for an SEO of their own.

GOOGLE, OPRAH LOOKING HOT IN '06

CNN Money

Annual Newsmaker Brands survey predicts high-tech and celebrity brands will sparkle next year.

What do Google, Oprah Winfrey, Las Vegas and the iPod have in common? These four are among the top 10 brands expected to sizzle in 2006, according to a published report Thursday.

The second annual list of image winners and losers from marketing firms Landor Associates and Penn Schoen & Berland also shows that consumers will continue to favor high-tech and feel-good brands next year, the paper said.

The list was based on a Newsmaker Brands survey which asked 1,744 consumers to rank 61 of the biggest brand newsmakers of the year -- products and celebrities -- on their performance this year and prospects in the year ahead, the report said.

The biggest category on the rise was technology, with Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo!, iPod and digital video recorders among the top 10 predicted winners in the new year, the paper said. Google tops the forecast for 2006.

Talk show queen Oprah Winfrey was second only to Google on the list of predicted winners in 2006, the report said.

Meanwhile, pop singer Britney Spears was ranked as the top predicted loser in 2006, followed by troubled air carrier United Airlines, the report said.

Both Donald Trump and his reality show "The Apprentice" made the 2006 loser list, the paper said. So did radio "shock jock" Howard Stern, who moves from free radio to satellite service Sirius on Jan. 9. The Hummer also got the thumbs down with consumers, the report said.