Where does your eyeball go first?
If you are looking for something ... a car, a cat, a dog, a couch, a print ad, a TV, a website, something ... what will your mind be attracted to first and foremost? And where does your eyeball linger longer or keep coming back? I guess this is something you have never thought about.
Well, as you know, marketers love to make a corner on every last aspect of user behavior, emotions and mentality. This idea of the eyeball is something that has been analyzed before, returning for decades. Think of a print ad layout using white space and a color picker or even a newspaper page layout with white space, gutters and photo placement. The big difference is that in the past, most of this kind of analysis was a guess or a gut feeling.
Picture Google Google Heat has selected all the assumptions from this equation.
Here's how it works ...
A Google study tracked the movement of learners to capture areas of color, text, and images that are appealing when a person is given visual information. It is a tool that entered the game not only for graphic designers and web designers, but also for marketers.
Heat map page
The Google Heat Heat page displays a different color for each part of the page, with each color representing the range of viewing activity. The study tracks the length of time that student students actually record in a specific area of the page (presumably to read a copy in this particular section). The red section is the “hottest”, with 80-100% of page viewers linger on that particular section.
The color values are destroyed as follows:
* Red - 80-100%
* Brown - 70-80%
* Yellow - 60-70%
* Green - 50-60%
* Light green - 40-50%
* Blues - 30-40%
So how does this serve you as a marketer, web designer or webmaster?
As in the days of advertising, it is important to understand how people browse web pages, how they travel through sites, and in what areas you can get your attention in order to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of your own website; s.
Sweet spots and the Golden Triangle
What, another new industry term? It's not so scary. SEO people refer to the Golden Triangle as a way to break some of these ideas from Page-Pot a bit more. For SEO-mavens, the sweet spot golden triangle is in the upper left corner of the search engine results page. Think about where your eyes go first when you do a Google search for spaghetti, saddles, custom drives, or anything else. Unconsciously, your view will almost always go to the top left corner of the results page ... and here is your Golden Triangle. This is useful for narrowing not only the natural search, but also the visibility of paid ads. The heat maps seem to indicate that the top center / left area gets the most visibility, with the top right column of the paid ad becoming the second. It actually makes sense when you think that printed English is read from left to right.
All this, of course, can be very useful for marketing purposes. You can even narrow it down to which part of the hyperlink attracts the user's attention. And Google’s research on heatmaps has been able to break everything further by looking at different user habits by gender, age, and other demographic factors. Google Eye Tracking report is now available; in most of these studies, he understands in more detail than I could here.
Example:
Google’s studies have classified the following habits for a user who goes to the search engine results page (this is pretty clear):
* Quick click
* Linear scan
* Golden Triangle
* Intentional scanning
* Search
Good, good, that everything is good and good, but ... how does this relate to your site, except in general terms, right? Well, this is definitely a legitimate question. At this time, Google Analytics does not include the Heat / Heat Map page, although it is rumored that it works. Here are some useful alternatives that operate on the same principles:
* Click Heat, rather than scanning the eyeball, click Heat, tracking the mouse cursor when it shoots around the page. This is an easy way to track some of these variables, but you can't beat the price (for free!).
* Crazy Egg - almost the same idea as Click Heat, Crazy Egg tracks clicks and mouse movement. It contains RSS or email notification of its reports, and can also maintain a real-time report.
* Click "Density" - this is a bit more, and you need to place about five lines of Javascript on each page where you want to track the results. It displays mouse movement on the x / y grid for you, which over time will show samples that can be developed into heat maps.
* Codynamix Cannoli is open source and is still in beta testing. It not only tracks the patterns of clicks and mouse movement over time, but also the day of the week, time of day and date. Do people click more on links for your products / services on Friday? Or every two weeks? Friday ... two weeks ... payday? This is information that you can extract and use to promote special offers or fine-tune your marketing by publishing information about fresh products on those days.
So you have it.
You own a small business with a website, a webmaster, a complete list of SEO ideas and a website that has been optimized for all of this. You need all the site optimization tools that you can place in the toolbar and store at your disposal. The Heat and Heat Maps page may not be the only and final ones, but this is a technology that is certainly interesting (if several Orvellian). One thing is certain - it is still in its earliest stages, and as it develops and improves, more and more marketers and web designers will track this (pun intended) and see how they can get the most out of their marketing efforts.
