Google Heatmap: what do we look at?

Win Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard by inspiring us with some smashing art work!
Find out more!

Google Heatmap: what do we look at?

Written on April 22, 2008 – 6:25 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,

We are looking at a presentation by Stephan Spencer, a web marketing expert and founder and president of interactive agency Netconcepts. His presentation is about search engine optimization.

One of the slides caught my eye because it is both beautiful, inspiring and educational. It shows a heatmap of where people actually click on a Google result page. What we can learn from this is how extremely important it is to be the number one result for any search and even for paid ads on Google. Interestingly enough the first result, which is watched and clicked most, is a paid result.

I hope you like that post!

The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our 'About' page and subscribe to our RSS feed.

Do you have a start-up that we should write about? Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!

heatmap, san francisco, search results, Stephan Spencer, web20expo

About the author: Serial entrepreneur and founder of several companies. Current activities include Fleck.com and The Next Web Conference & Blog.

Post that could be related to this post:

Time lapse video: Official Google Doodle

Ever wondered who draws those Google Doodles? You know, those subtle variations on Google's logo? Check out this Time Lapse video of Chief Google Doodler(!) Dennis Hwang drawing a real Google Doodle: [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOOY0xuQ3TU] Google also announced today...

Google Knol: How I reached Page 1 on Google in 24 hours.

The Google Knol I created just yesterday entitled 'How to Read the Russian Alphabet in 75 Minutes' is already appearing on Page 1 of a Google Search for "read russian" with 12,300,000 results following. The...

Google release a new home page design for Japan

Via a tip off from one of my staff in our internal office chat here at UltraSuperNew Inc., comes news that Google has updated the interface for its top page for Japanese users. The new design...

3 comments/trackbacks to “Google Heatmap: what do we look at?”

Apr 23, 2008: » Google Search Result Heat Map
[...] via: the Next Web [...]

By Sebastian Moeys on Apr 23, 2008 | Reply

Really interesting.
By Ruben on Apr 24, 2008 | Reply

Just to be sure: a heatmap shows where people looked, not where they clicked. Odd enough, this isnt always the same, especially since heatmaps are aggregated from different users, they can be misleading. It’s a bit like doing a questionnaire with n=20 and reporting only the average scores.

For more hard data on where people actually click:
(in Dutch) http://www.usarchy.com/2006/11.....hine-data/

(In English) http://wwwscope.com/2006/08/27.....-analysis/