We are looking at a presentation by Stephan Spencer, a web marketing expert and founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts. His presentation is about search engine optimization.
One of the slides caught my eye because it is both beautiful, inspiring and educational. It shows a heatmap of where people actually click on a Google result page. What we can learn from this is how extremely important it is to be the number one result for any search and even for paid ads on Google. Interestingly enough the first result, which is watched and clicked most, is a paid result.
Really interesting.
Just to be sure: a heatmap shows where people looked, not where they clicked. Odd enough, this isnt always the same, especially since heatmaps are aggregated from different users, they can be misleading. It’s a bit like doing a questionnaire with n=20 and reporting only the average scores.
For more hard data on where people actually click:
(in Dutch) http://www.usarchy.com/2006/11/conclusies-aol-zoekmachine-data/
(In English) http://wwwscope.com/2006/08/27/aol-data-the-analysis/