Game Changing Marketing Technology

Last week I had the pleasure of joining Gord Hotchkiss and Lance Loveday for a session on post-click marketing at Search Insider Summit on Captiva Island, Florida. What a great conference — less about PowerPoint panels at a distance, and more about speakers and attendees interactively discussing topics together.

For the post-click session, Gord arranged for volunteers in advance to have their search ads and corresponding sites subjected to an impromptu eye tracking and usability study. Bank of America, Sylvan Learning, Grainger, and Purina were all kind enough (brave enough?) to step up.

In reviewing the results together, many of the best practices that we all know but don’t always remember, popped out on the big screen, writ large. As the old adage goes, the eyes don’t lie — and seeing how people were visually engaging with a page was incredibly telling.

Here are the top 10 post-click marketing tips that came up in the session and the roundtable discussions afterwards:

1. The Golden Triangle is as hot as ever. The upper-left quadrant of the search results page is where you want to be — either in the top ad positions or the top couple organic listing. Your titles and the first few words of your description are where the brain rushes to determine your relevance to its goal. (Image borrowed from a previous Enquiro eye tracking study.)

2. The click is fleeting — about 2 1/2 seconds. With time elapse eye tracking, you can see how people move across the page, seeking their goal. According to Gord, most of their eye tracking experiments show that people spend about 2 1/2 second looking at any given search ad, maybe flitting back-and-forth between the top candidates in that Golden Triangle.

3. Search is goal-oriented, home pages are usually not. It’s puzzling that so many people still direct search traffic to their home page, when this is a well-documented cause of disconnects. A search — and the resulting search ad — speak to a prospect about something very specific. A site’s home page, however, serves many diverse audiences, with many different (and often competing!) goals. Linking a search respondent there dissipates their momentum, usually forcing them to hunt-and-peck for relevance… or simply causing them to abandon the page.

4. Having too many choices is bad. With lots of choices on the page, eye tracking reveals that people dart around the screen, confused and distracted by all the various options, possibly relying on some instinctive “banner blindness” to rule out whole sections of the page. The heat map showing this scattered eye tracking — dots of attention, randomly all over the page — was referred to by someone as the Golden Sprinkle, a striking, dispersed contrast to the Golden Triangle. Anna’s post on the paradox of choice, why 4 is better than 5, 3 is better than 4, and 2 is better than 3, covers some of the theory behind this.

5. Choices should be clear and set expectations. Especially in web site pages, respondents can be unintentionally given multiple choices that seem similar, causing different people to click in different directions, looking for the same thing, but ending up in different places. In the context of a specific, identifiable search goal, it’s best to have an unambiguous path to guide the respondent to their objective. See my earlier post on post-click segmentation and the MECE principle for designing good choices — that serve both you and the respondent.

6. Keep the amount of text on the first page to a minimum. People generally don’t like to read a lot online. Especially in the context of a landing page for a paid search ad. Remember, respondents are coming from a 2 1/2 second view of your ad. They’re now looking for a 5-10 second confirmation that you will fulfill their expectations. If you give them a sea of text to read, they’ll only briefly scan through it — possibly missing the key points, losing the information scent in a cacophony of information. Better to give them a 5-10 second dose of confirmation — a few brief sentences, bullets, relevant visuals — and then let them click through to more details. Refer to Justin’s classic post: How to post-click? Ask any salesman.

7. Dominant images in the center of the page are eye magnets. If you have a dominant image, or set of images, at the center of your page, the eye is naturally drawn there. It’s a Golden Bullseye in the eye tracking heat map. If the image is just an image, with little information content, and no clickable choices, that burst of attention is largely wasted (again, another flaw of many home pages). On the other hand, if you cluster your choices in this visual epicenter — a few, clear, relevant choices with strong information scent — you can gravitationally pull people down the conversion path.

8. Don’t make forms too long. You’ve no doubt heard this a thousand times. Still, there are forms out there that ask a lot of questions. Aside from seeming like a lot of work, which can dissuade people short on time and faith that you’re the right one for them every question you ask is one more opportunity for the respondent to wonder, “why do they need to know that to give me a friggin’ [white paper, fulfillment piece, webinar, call from a sales rep]?”. Forms early in the funnel should be simple invitations to begin a dialogue, not an application for a bank loan. By the way, having more fields dynamically appear as you answer questions can really tick people off, who feel like you’ve tricked them into a longer process than they expected.

9. Marketing “happy talk” has little value. Lance Loveday made this observation on a number of the pages we reviewed — lots of headlines and copy blocks that used fluffy marketing language. The example from Bank of America, for instance, was a major headline that said “home has a new address”, followed by a call-to-action labeled “see what it means for you”. Lance argued — and I agree with him — that this tells a respondent very little and doesn’t inspire engagement — the content equivalent of rice cakes. Clever copy can be good, but it needs to communicate real information to meet the expectations of the searcher.

10. Customized landing pages for specific terms are the most effective. This came up in the roundtable discussion I joined after the session. Many of the marketers confirmed that their highest performing search terms where those matched with specific landing pages. The only debate was how far to go down The Long Tail. Most found the logistics of addressing more than the head of the tail with targeted landing pages was too daunting. If you’re doing landing pages in an ad hoc fashion, that can be a real limiting barrier. The good news, however, is that by implementing good landing page management processes and software, you can move a lot further down the tail, with a lot less overhead.

Thanks again to Gord Hotchkiss and the Search Insider Summit group for letting me join them on this topic. I got a lot out of it — I hope they did too!