Eye tracking guides to more clicks on Google Places iPhone app

Background

In late 2011, Mediative, a division of the Yellow Pages Group in Canada, published their research on Google Places in a whitepaper entitled ‘Eye Tracking and Click Mapping Google Places’. In that study, they had participants run through four tasks using Google Places on a desktop computer. Based on eye tracking and click data, they were able to make some recommendations about what businesses need to do to get the most from a Google Places listing. To test if the findings would still hold true on a mobile device, they decided to repeat the same study, but on an iPhone using the free Google Places app.

Research objectives

Mediative wanted to find out how people interact with the search results from Google Places listings on a mobile device, in this case an iPhone, using the free Google Places app:

• Where do people look on the mobile interface?
• Does it make a difference if a listing has reviews?
• What role do images play?
• What should businesses think about to make sure that their Google listing is being used to its fullest extent by mobile phone users? 

Eye tracking and verbal feedback

Researchers designed a simple study to collect eye tracking and click data as well as verbal feedback from a smaller number of users. Twelve individuals participated in the study in the TiveTank™ research room in Mediative’s Toronto office. Demographically, there was an even number of male and female participants, ranging in age from 21 to 45. 

Participants were given the same scenario as in the previous Google Places study—an imaginary road trip with stops in Hamilton, London, Winnipeg and Edmonton with the task of choosing a place for a friend to get a tattoo in each of those cities based on the Google Places search results. Researchers let participants enter their own search terms on real live pages from the Google Places iPhone app, using an iPhone attached to the Tobii Mobile Device Stand. Throughout the sessions, participants were able to take hold of the phone and interact with it in a natural way while a Tobii X60 Eye Tracker recorded their gaze data. 

Afterwards, researchers compiled the individual sessions from all participants in Tobii Studio. Heat map visualizations, representing aggregate gaze data from all participants, were created to supplement the qualitative findings. Based on verbal feedback from the participants, as well as analysis of their individual and aggregated eye tracking sessions, researchers were able to draw conclusions about their visual attention and interaction with the Google Places iPhone app search results pages.

Scrolling further down the listings

One of the observed differences between the two studies was that participants would sometimes scroll further down the listings on the iPhone than they did on a computer monitor. Researchers attributed this to two things: 

• There is considerably less space on an iPhone screen compared to a computer screen so only three complete business listings can be seen at once on the iPhone. If none of the first three listings enticed a click the first time they were seen, then people started scrolling down the page. Of course, sometimes they scrolled back up and clicked on a listing they had already scanned. 
• The iPhone interface makes it fast and easy to scroll up and down, so that ease of use means the value of looking at additional listings outweighs any small inconvenience caused by having to scroll.

Eye tracking results

Eye tracking data showed that people typically started by looking on the upper left side, then across the listing, and then back and down to the next listing. After a couple of listings were viewed, that scanning pattern might break as they either move down the right side looking at images or start scrolling down the left side.  

The gaze plot image on the right shows an example of how a participant’s eyes scanned the iPhone screen in the first 5 seconds. The numbers show the gaze sequence timeline and the size of the yellow dots represent the relative amount of time this person spent looking at that part of the screen. We can see here that the third image caught and held this person’s attention.
On the right is an eye tracking heat map. The red areas are where more time was spent looking at the screen, followed by yellow and then green. Notice how the second image got more attention. It’s the only image on this screen of a tattoo; both the other images are of storefronts.
On the right is a screen capture from a video of one of the eye tracking sessions. The red dots are tracing the participant’s eye movement as they get ready to click on the image with their thumb. The participant has scanned across the positive reviews and is about to click on the image.
If participants start scrolling down, then their gaze will stay on the left side until they hit a listing of interest. In the examples we used in this study, in almost every case it meant that they would scroll down until they hit a listing with a better than 3-star review. When the top results have fewer social signals such as reviews, lower results get more visual attention. This presents an opportunity for businesses whose websites are not listed at the top; they can be more competitive by adding positive reviews.
The heat map on the right shows that even though Metamorphosis Custom Tattoo wasn’t listed in the top position, eyes were drawn to the positive reviews, and the listing outperformed the others on this screen as evidenced by the clicks it earned.

Click results

With twelve participants doing four tasks, researchers had a potential of 48 clicks. At the end of the study, researchers had 47 clicks as one participant failed to complete one of the tasks. Still, they saw some interesting indicators that researchers recommend businesses carefully consider. 

Recommendations for advertisers

With just a little effort managing your Google Places listing, the potential is good for getting a greater share of clicks on the Google Places app for iPhone: 

• If a business website is listed in any position other than the top three and lacks social signals, it will be relatively ignored, especially if there are other listings that do have social signals. In other words, get some reviews going on your listing!
• Listings that had at least 3+ star reviews took 41 out of 47 clicks. Therefore, a business that has no reviews on their Google Places listing is certainly going to miss out on potential clicks. Positive reviews on the Google Places iPhone app were the biggest single factor observed that determine which listings got clicks and which did not. The number of reviews matters too. Of the 47 clicks, 29 went to listings that had at least four reviews. 
• Images on the iPhone listings are very small, but people do look at them. Qualitatively, people said that they look at the images to see if the business looks trustworthy. If they paused on a listing because of the social proof offered by positive reviews, they would then look at the image before making a decision to click. The image that accompanies a listing should therefore be given special consideration, and an image that might work on a desktop might not work as well when reduced to a phone.