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Went Hot: September 16, 2007 - 5:48 am
Posted By: TimDineen 356 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.smallbusinesshub.com)
Category: SEO
Well... now we have DATA
12 Comments
Went Hot: September 16, 2007 - 5:48 am
Posted By: TimDineen 356 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.smallbusinesshub.com)
Category: SEO
Well... now we have DATA
12 Comments
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Comments
"1) The eyetracking activity is actually pretty similar between the long and short URL listings, so they are both getting a lot of attention.
2) But the clicks (the good stuff!) were more focused on the listing with the shorter URL."
But what were the titles of the pages with the different URLs? Maybe the one with the shorter URL had other things going for it to get those clickthroughs.
@qwerty - This is part of a larger study, not just a one-off of a specific SERP. The original report is from Marketing Sherpa's "Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2008."
I suppose they would go into more detail in the paid version, but that costs $297.
Don't show her the typical URLs on this site then:
http://www.payless.com/Catalog/ProductDetail.aspx?&TLC=Mens&SLC=MensCasual&BLC=MensCasualBoat&Width=Wide&ItemCode=55880&LotNumber=054255&Type=Adult&Popularity=73&DescriptiveColor=Black
Count 'em.
Nine parameters; of which eight are redundant.
http://www.payless.com/Catalog/ProductDetail.aspx?ItemCode=55880
How do those types of sites ever get online without someone involved in the processs questioning the design?
Nice URL g1smd - isn't it good to repeat keywords in URLs over and over and over? (kidding)
This is interesting. I wonder if it is long urls that are the problem or urls with a lot of parameters.
I have a site with a url that is 29 characters not including www. or .com and performs very well...CTR over 20% in adwords for queries that similar to the URL. So, I believe how closely the url matches the query is a major factor too.
Some of those extra parameters are actually there to build the navigation links OUT from that page... implementation stuff that should be pulled from a database not embedded in the URL.
Modify some of the parameter values and see what you get. You'll see the same product but with different links out from the page. You can make the product "appear" to be in a different category.
According to the PDF, which you can find a link to on this page
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=30128
The test measured the number of times users clicked on a listing following a long/short URL. Looking at the eye-tracking graph, you see 2~5 clicks recorded for each URL.
Wait a minute. How can you draw conclusions based on 2-5 clicks? Not to mention the length of TITLEs, TITLE texts' relevance to the search query, and texts in the description fields are completely ignored as if they weren't a factor in user behavior at all. To conduct a test with three variables, for example, you must keep two of those variables the same. Otherwise the result is meaningless.
"viewers spend time trying to decipher what's in the URL itself"
The test doesn't measure the time users spend scanning URLs, so this statement is just a hypothesis.
"The page appears to add another break in it visually and push searchers to click on the listings under the one with a long URL."
"By keeping the URL shorter, the focus remains on the title of your listing"
Again, none of these statements are proven by their data.
@Halfdeck - did you buy the full report? For that matter, has anyone?
The PDF is just a summary of conclusions that were made. As I said above, I assume the supporting data is in the full report.
Microsoft Research looks at user review of result URLs in this study "An eye-tracking study of information usage in Web search: Variations in target position and contextual snippet length" ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2007-01.pdf
From the study:
The next two questions were also very interesting: “When
I'm searching the Web, I often look at the URL of each
search result to help me decide if the page will be useful.”
And: “When I'm searching the Web, I usually read the
snippet (text under the title) to help me decide if the page
will be useful.” For these questions, the median scores were
7 and 6 respectively, and the means were 6.4 and 6.2. These
answers suggest that our participants deliberately use
various elements in the search results to help them find
what they are looking for. We were particularly surprised to
see the overwhelming endorsement of the URL because this
is often characterized as a “power-user” feature that is used
by only a small percentage of users.
"The PDF is just a summary of conclusions that were made. As I said above, I assume the supporting data is in the full report."
Ok, then Mike Volpe is wrong to conclude his wife is right if I assume he didn't read the full report either. And if he did read it, he hasn't brought up any data in his article to support his conclusion.
I'm carping on this because I don't like seeing information being spread without any factual data to back it up.
I can't comment as to Mike Volpe's conclusions or whether he has the full report, but as it's MarketingSherpa that is putting this out there I'd assume that they aren't just making stuff up.
I'd like to hear if anyone has purchased the $297 report. Any reviews? (before I consider buying it myself)?
You must always listen to your wife.