Was Blended Too Good for Google?

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Search Engine Strategies is back in London next week and it reminded me of the paper that I gave there last year, I thought it would make a good a blog article, so here it is!

In 2008 Paul McCartney and Heather Mills announced their separation precipitating a lot of press coverage. This coincided with Google’s experimentation with blended search results:

As you can see the blended results get organic positions one, two and nine. We ran a sample of 30 people thru our omnibus study, giving them the task to “Find out more about Paul McCartney”. We left the task deliberately vague because we wanted the users to explore something of interest to themselves. The heatmaps of all 30 users shows that the blended results received a lot of attention:

The problem for Google is that the blended results receive almost all the attention, sucking user gazes away from the sponsored links like little black holes. If users don’t look at a link they can’t even consider clicking it, this is a problem if your revenue model is based on PPC!

A few days before I was due to talk at SES 2008 I thought I’d better check to make sure the data was still current, it wasn’t:

As you can see Google had reduced the number of blended results in the first nine organic places from three to one, de-prioritising the importance of blended.

I did the same search today (10th February 2009) and they have changed the algorithm again:

further de-prioritising the blended results down to organic position five. As we have found in previous research organic listings below rank three are much less valuable that ones in the top three.

We will never know how much revenue Google lost by experimenting with blended results, but I expect it’s more that the $4,000 it would have cost to pre-test the concept with Think. Just goes to show even Google gets it wrong on occasion!

MENG Marketing Trends 2009

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A recent survey completed by Anderson Analytics for the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) has revealed that two-thirds of executives believe their use of market research will stay the same or grow over the coming year.

As market researchers, and especially given the current economic climate, this is great news for us!

So we want to let all of the marketers out there know that Think Eyetracking is listening and addressing the current marketing trends.

1. Innovation and market research are key.

Here at Think Eyetracking we pride ourselves on using innovative methods.  We have the first eyetracking omnibus in the UK, we have unique software to help you clearly understand and apply the research we do, and our approach combines implicit and explicit research tools.

2. Customer satisfaction is a priority.

By the very nature of eyetracking all of our research is done in face to face interviews.  We talk to actual customers, and our implicit techniques allow us to find out what they will actually do, not just what they say they will do.  The first step in satisfying customers is understanding what they really want, so explicit questioning and self-reports are not enough.

3. China is ranked as the no.1 area for opportunity.

We are also grabbing opportunity by the horns and have just opened a Hong Kong office so we will be there as a local resource as marketers expand to Asia.

4. Green marketing is losing importance.

Although the issue of global warming saw a decrease in importance in the survey, we’re not trend followers.  We’ll still be doing our part to minimise the damage we’re doing to the planet.  Think Eyetracking has teamed up with Carbon Clear, an organisation who specialises in managing carbon efficiency.  We will still be planting trees for our participants.