Following up on last week’s interview post with Microsoft’s Ken Headrick I thought it would be useful to share some additional insights that came from follow up questions I had with him.
How important is a #1 ranking?
The first insight relates to “golden triangle” that Ken talked about when discussing how important it is to be #1 in the search engine’s index. Ken referred to data from Enquiro, a Canadian company (I actually interviewed Enquiro founder George Hotchkiss recently and he shared some very useful insights).
Here is a picture of what Ken was referring to taken from Enquiro’s website:
This represents output from Enquiro’s eye tracking software which records where your eyes go when you are on a page. As you can see with the three main search engines, if you’re not at the top of the page, you pretty much will get ignored. The red color indicates a significant amount of time spent looking at a particular section on the screen. From these results, Google users in particular only seem to pay attention to the #1 result while Microsoft searchers look over a few of the top results before making up their mind where to click.
Is Microsoft A Better Place For Advertisers?
Another one of Ken’s interview answers included the following statement:
Microsoft adCenter (the system you use to book PPC ads on Microsoft Live Search) provides the highest conversions in many categories.
I found this interesting and later asked him to provide a few more specifics where possible. His Marketing Manager, Melanie, quickly got back to me with the following information:
Microsoft Live Search has the highest conversion rates—on average, 71% higher than Yahoo! and twice that of Google.**Conversion is defined as a web visitor entering into a secure session on a website. ComScore Study September–November 2007.Specific Categories that Live Search has had a higher conversion rate higher than Google and Yahoo!
- Travel
- Auto
- Retail
Once again, if you’re interested in meeting Ken and learning more about him and Microsoft’s search engine, he is one of speakers at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto conference.
Matthew Toren is an Award Winning Author, Serial Entrepreneur, and Investor. He Co-Founded YoungEntrepreneur.com along with his brother Adam. Matthew is co-author of the newly released book:Small Business, Big Vision: “Lessons on How to Dominate Your Market from Self-Made Entrepreneurs Who Did it Right” and also co-author of Kidpreneurs.
I am sure this also goes beyond just being number one on the search engines. If someone were just hoping from site to site or going through their rss reader it would probably be very beneficial to have a catchy or thought provoking title to work with. We well in designing a website to optimize visitor retention where specific buttons, icons or ads should be located. I like the pictures of the eye tracking.
I really enjoyed this information.
Very straightforward and helpful.
I personally have gotten a lot of good use from a software that will help you create excellent and effective text ads. It is called Glyphius.Check it out at http://www.glyphius.com