I Want to See an Eye-Tracking & Click-Thru Heat Map for This
That’s the example Google used today in announcing the formal rollout of its local carousel search results.
I’m not opted in to this yet, but when I look at the screenshot there … I don’t have a clue where to focus. I’m dying to know how the average searcher looks at it, aren’t you?
Ack! That is visual confusion. I’m guessing that the average searcher would be all over the (heat) map with it. A poor user experience, in my book.
Did you see this from Harrison Jones at Search Engine Land? “Homepage Sliders: Bad For SEO, Bad For Usability” : http://searchengineland.com/homepage-sliders-are-bad-for-seo-usability-163496
Thanks for the post, Matt!
Good point, Matt:
Although since google has been running this view on tablets already they have a strong idea on what to anticipate.
One perspective I have on this is that when google switched its image search layout back in late January this year it actually crushed visits to sites. I wonder how this carousel view will impact traffic to smb sites, restaurant sites and hotel sites.
If you run a great variety of hotel searches with “hotel/city” or “city/hotel” the top of the fold is the carousel, ADS, ADS, ADS and often google’s list of hotel pricing.
……hmmmm that seems like a great way to increase clicks on adwords to me.
In some regards, and if it has an impact on website traffic as did the change in image search…it will diminish traffic to the individual urls.
I suppose we’ll start hearing some feedback mighty soon!!!!
Hi Matt
Thanks for posting this. Don’t know how I missed it. I think with all things new, it’s going to take some getting used to.
I would also love to see data for this regarding what users are looking at and where they’re clicking. No doubt Google has already run tests and will also be gathering a lot of data from users at the moment.