You click where you look

via Sendtec by Eyetools

The above graph shows an important correlation between increased link viewing and the probability of being clicked. The plot shows the percentage of valid clicks recorded from all participants as a function of percentage viewing behavior during the first presentation of a search result listing. The page elements which received the most clicks were those seen by the most users. As user viewing decreased, so did the number of clicks. The data was fit with an exponential function (solid black line) which had a correlation coefficient of 0.95. This means that decreases in viewing will have a disproportionately large negative impact on click-through.A number of other studies have explored various factors which influence a user’s decision to click including link text, description, and perceived link relevance. Our study shows that percent user viewing can be an excellent predictor of user click behavior for online searches. Our study supports the logic that users must first see a link before they can make selections based on text descriptions or relevance. There are many factors which contribute to whether or not a user decides to select a link, but all things considered, eye tracking data is a reliable and efficient way of understanding why people do and do not click.It is important to note that this data is specific to search results and should not be used in conversation about standard webpages. Eyetracking has proven to be very helpful in directing redesigns of web pages, landing pages, and emails with great increases in conversion rates, but this data presented here is specific to search result pages and should not be generalized to other pages. DetailsClicks were considered valid if the click would have produced a response from a link, image, textbox, or button element on the search results page. Clicks in whitespace areas were excluded from this analysis. We analyzed 1185 valid clicks from our study.Percentage viewing was defined as the heatmap value of each element. Each page element was assigned its highest heatmap value regardless of the location of the click. For example a link may have read:Digital Camera Reviews Find the Best Digital Cameras - News & Reviews.The link's highest heatmap value of 65% viewing may have been centered over the words "Digital Camera Reviews", but a user may have clicked off to the side on the words "News &". Although only 45% of users may have read the entire link, 65% of participants saw the page element. All clicks on this link would have been placed in the 60-79% viewing bin. Clicking off to the right is a common behavior we have observed many times when studying search result interactions.