As I mentioned in my previous post, during the months of December and January we have been carrying out a Search Marketing study aimed at Tourism, using Eyetracking technology.Read previous post)
Well, another test we did with the users we were testing consisted of asking them to search for a hotel in Barcelona by doing a search on Google “Barcelona hotel” (without quotes).
(You might be wondering why we told them what search needed to be performed… the explanation is simple: in order to make the heat maps aggregating all the results, it is necessary that all users see exactly the same page, so in reality, the search is already done and we have it saved locally instead of working live against Google. In this way, all users see exactly the same page and the study can be done under better conditions.)
Let’s continue…
One of the things we wanted to find out when we conducted this test was whether users would go to a hotel brokerage site or choose a specific hotel. The results were conclusive: 741% of users opted for a brokerage site and only 261% clicked on a result that belonged to a hotel. Interestingly, all users who clicked directly on a hotel did so via Google Maps.
My honest opinion is that in some cases (and I think this is one of them) the motivation of the tested users is not the same as that of the real users. I think this is the explanation for why so many people clicked on the first result, and few people scrolled to see results that were off the screen (only 33% did so). This fact does not invalidate the test since the recordings that did not seem correct to us have not been taken into account, but it does put the results into perspective a little, especially the statistical ones. It is better to focus on the qualitative analysis and find out why they clicked where they did.
So let's look at why people clicked where they clicked:
When we asked users why they had clicked where they had clicked, most of those who clicked on a brokerage portal indicated that they did so on that particular one because they were already familiar with it.
People who clicked on the hotels also indicated that it was because they knew it or because they had heard about the hotel and knew it was nice, or well located, etc.
In some cases, users indicated that it was the title of the ad that had caught their attention the most. Especially the “400 hotels in Barcelona” from Booking.
In other cases, certain words caught their attention, made users read the title and the accompanying text and click on it. This is the case, for example, of Splendia in AdWords, which appears in 5th position on the left… a position where theoretically it should hardly have received any clicks.
The topic of words that attract a lot of attention and make people focus their gaze and click there, deserves a special analysis… so we will talk about these words in the next post.
…and another interesting thing related to this search: only 4 hotels appear among the results that appear on this first page for natural positioning (SEO). Well, 3 of them are hotels that we have consulted to get to position themselves on this page: the Hotel Púlitzer, the Hotel Axel and the Hotel Royal Ramblas. It is something that all members of GEA Internet we feel proud.
Post note: The study has already been published. You can download it here: Eyetracking Search Media .
