The "Slums" of Search 19 Sep 2007

Here are some interesting snippets from Search Engine Land's recent article on sponsored search listings.

On positioning:

"There is a dramatic difference in how users interact with top sponsored ads (also called the 'North' ads) versus the right rail side sponsored ads (called the 'East' ads). Top sponsored ads are directly in the navigation path. We orient ourselves in the upper left of the results page and begin down from there. Usually a sponsored ad is the first thing we would see. In fact, in our recent eye tracking study we saw that this was true in well over 80% of the user interactions we monitored. First fixations (80.6% of all sessions for Google, 86.7% for MSN and 83.7% for Yahoo) and first significant scanning (71% of all sessions for Google, 55% for MSN and 79.1% for Yahoo) usually happened in top sponsored ads when they're present. Even when our searches are more research-based, if top sponsored ads appear we tend to at least glance at them on our way down to the organic results.

"Side sponsored ads are treated as a sidebar by the user. They're not in any direct navigational paths, they're more obviously identified as advertising and they tend to be in the portion of the page that people set aside for further scanning if and when they choose to. They're far removed from the 'area of greatest promise' on the search results page."

On users' reluctance to click on sponsored search listings:

"At Enquiro we actually did studies and asked people why they were reluctant to click on sponsored ads. The most common response was that they didn't trust the advertiser. They felt that by clicking on the link they would end up on an affiliate or spam site and may get caught in a never-ending cascade of pop-up windows. Searchers were very wary. In the US, this attitude began to change as known brands began to adopt search. If you're doing a search for a digital camera and you see brands like Nikon, Pentax, Kodak, HP and Canon appear, you have any greater sense of trust in both the relevancy and quality of those links. You're more likely to click through."

On the importance of relevancy and quality:

"In our second eye tracking study where we compared Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search (at the time Microsoft search property was MSN) we noticed a strange inconsistency in the interaction with top sponsored ads on the Microsoft search results page. In some cases we saw a level of interaction that was consistent with what we were seeing on Google and Yahoo. But in a number of cases we saw virtually no interaction with top sponsored ads. It was almost as if banner blindness was occurring...As we started looking at some of the sessions in more detail we noticed that there was a dramatic drop in the quality of the sponsored ads that were appearing on MSN in these cases. By doing a little research we found that the time period in which we were doing the data collection for the study corresponded to exactly the same time that Microsoft was experimenting with showing ads from their own inventory in the top sponsored locations rather than from their partner, Yahoo's inventory. As we looked at the sessions it also became obvious that the relevancy and quality of the ads that were coming from the Microsoft inventory was dramatically lower than those coming from the more mature Yahoo inventory. We went through and divided up the session based on the inventories from which the ads were drawn and did some comparison. The results were startling to say the least. When the ads came from Yahoo's inventory, users spend an average of 4.93 seconds looking at them, which represented 41.6% of the total time on the page. These ads also captured 42.86% of the click throughs. But when the ads came from Microsoft's inventory, users spent an average of 1.5 seconds on them, representing just 11.48% of the total time on the page. And these ads captured only 5.8% of the click throughs. Microsoft turned their top sponsored spots into a low rent district and users moved out."