Gerry Moira Chairman & Director of Creativity, Euro RSCG says that this is a great ad:
Award Winning Freelander Ad.
Does the collective subconscious of 90 people make a better judge than 1 Gerry Moira?
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Tag Archives: eyetracking user testing
Brand Building Takes Time AND Talent
The lead story in this week’s Campaign about Pfizer looking for a retained European agency a for a well known pharmaceutical product reminded us of the award winning advert for Vitta Farma:
The Original Vitta Farma Ad
So we tested the advert in our omnibus in the context of Men’s Health magazine with a sample of thirty men and found that the advert elicited subconscious emotional responses of surprise with confusion, mild shock and in some cases disgust. These emotions were not resolved in the majority of readers because they did not know what the brand Vitta Farma does and they didn’t read the white out of pink text ‘Medicine for erectile dysfunction with special discount.’ As can be seen by the eye tracking heat map. Continue reading
Eye tracking and User Experience for Game Play
Two of the things that I love about eye tracking are:
- Actionable results
- Intuitive and easy to understand reporting
The eye tracking on this piece of research was done using a head mounted eye tracker by Locarna. This type of eyetracker is particularly useful for shopper research or as we will see, other real World situations such as user testing games that have novel or complex interfaces and peripherals.
One of the most successful areas for growth in the last decade has been the games industry; it grossed $11.7 billion in the US alone in 2008 which, surprisingly for some, is more than the film industry. Continue reading
Was Blended Too Good for Google?
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!