Marketing Defined

For those of you searching out the best location for your Google Adsense ads .. a recent Eyetools Research report Lessons Learned From Eye Tracking Studies is a real “eyeopener” (pardon the pun:-)

Darn! .. the results outlined in the Eyetool research PDF, screams at me: “You should have left your Adsense ads on the top left hand side of the body of each Post without changing them to the top of each page.”

.. now whose research would you go along with: Joel Comm who pulls in around $15,000 monthly with Adsense and his best selling E-book What Google Never Told You About Making Money With Adsense which recommends placement at the top of your posts, and always above the fold ..

.. or this startling Eyetools Report that directs us to the left hand sidebar as the best location to pull in the highest profit.

First of all let me tell those of you who usually place all your important buying links in the Right Hand Sidebar of your web page,  will be scurrying to move your links over to the Left Hand sidebar after reading this :-

EYETOOLS INTERNET MARKETING RESEARCH TRENDS REPORT:

Chris Sherman from Search Day and Jupiter Media had this to say on Lessons learned from Eye Tracking Studies:

You’ve optimized your web pages to be search engine friendly, and they’re ranking well in search result pages, but so what if users don’t actually do what you’d like them to do once they arrive at your web site.

A couple of weeks ago, in an article A New F-Word for Google Search Results, Chris wrote about a recent study that tracked user eye movements on Google search result pages. That study focused on how users perceived titles and snippets from organic results, as well as sponsored links.

The study found that users looked mostly at the top part of a search result page, with results lower down on the list getting little to no attention.

These results were significant, because they reiterated the importance of organic search engine optimization to make sure that your web site has a fair chance of being found by Google users.

But what happens if you’ve created a great, search friendly page that shows up at the top of search results, and yet when people click through to that page they don’t see your important marketing messages?

Or their eyes are drawn to elements on the page that aren’t central to the behavior you hope to elicit by attracting them to your web site in the first place?

And how would you even know?

Eye Tools, the company that performed the eye tracking experiments for the Google study, offers some interesting additional research that can help you better understand how to design your own web pages for maximum impact after users have found your site via search engines.

Even if you don’t follow eye tracking studies, the conclusions drawn from these studies can really help you understand how people read and behave on different types of web sites.

In another case, Eyetools analyzed a recent redesign of the Washington Post’s home page.

Eyetools concluded that the “above the fold” portion of the page was effective and well designed. But an eye tracking analysis suggested everything below the fold was virtually invisible, leading Edwards to conclude that the Washington Post had wasted money on the design.

Search marketers can also learn from these studies because they offer compelling evidence that there’s more to search engine optimization than simply creating search friendly web sites that rank well on result pages.

To get a sense of how you can use eye tracking to design better web pages, Eyetools offers a PDF of a homepage redesign using Eyetools eye tracking (4 pages, 905 K, images of a site before/after, plus Eyetools heatmaps)

The startling results of this Eyetools analysis revealed that the left hand side navigation bar was what 70% of people bothered to look at .. the right hand side was often completely ignored ..

This is fascinating reading if you want to keep visitors at your website once they get there … I have provided a download of the Eyetools PDF for you to access … please do not “hotlink” to the files and images on my website if you choose to offer this PDF to your subscribers .. bandwidth is precious. Fair warning: there are fairly sophisticated trackers available to identify bandwidth theft in minutes.

Your thoughts on where you will place your Google Adsense ads after viewing the Eyetool research report are welcome in the Comments section .. your views, even the negative, are important and always welcome.