A new eye-tracking and click-tracking study from Mediative (formerly known as Enquiro) shows the value of having the top spot in Google’s local results, but also suggests that social content and signals can boost rankings further down the page.

Mediative’s study of online click-tracking:

• Most clicks went to the first listing, with the second and third businesses getting progressively fewer clicks.
• The fourth listing, the one with a review and text snippets, appears to have had more click activity than the third result.
• The top-ranked business always garnered attention and clicks, but listings further down the page did well when they had additional social content like star ratings, reviews and text snippets.
• When the top results have fewer social signals such as reviews (e.g. London), lower results get more visual attention.
• If your website is listed in any position other than the top, and your listing does not include any social signals, it will be relatively ignored, especially if there are other listings that do have social signals.

An eye tracking study done in July 2010 reveals some new insights into searcher behavior.

The study shows that the search snippet, often the meta description from the site, is an extremely important factor for searchers. It is fixated ovre more than the title or URL… searchers spent more time reading the snippet.

UK based SEO firm BrightLocal recently conducted an online survey of just over 2,000 consumers in the US and UK to determine local search usage patterns and attitudes. They found:

• 71% of online consumers consulted local business reviews at least occasionally, with 22% saying they do so regularly
• Those in the 35-54 age range consult reviews more than other groups
• 55% of US consumers trust a local business more after reading positive online reviews, and reviews appear to have a meaningful impact on consumer behavior
• 67% of respondents say they trust online reviews as much as word of mouth recommendations

More than 87% of travelers expect to take the same or more number of personal or business trips in 2011 versus years past. This outlook is positive, and with the rise of mobile, social and video behaviors, we are now seeing seeing travelers move through five key stages of travel. Here are some insights within each stage:

• Dreaming: 68% of business travelers watch travel-related online videos. Among them, 68% are thinking about a trip.
• Planning: The average traveler visits ~22 travel related sites during 9.5 research sessions prior to booking.  85% of leisure travelers consider the internet their main source of travel planning.
• Booking: 37% of leisure travelers report that the internet prompted them to book, up from 28% two years ago.  53% of travelers plan to increase comparison shopping this year.
• Experiencing: 70% of business travelers check into their flights/hotel with their mobile device. Almost 1 in 4 hotel queries come from a mobile phone.  Over 50% of travelers use mobile phone or device for travel-related information.
• Sharing: About 1 in 3 business travelers have posted reviews online of places they’ve been.

I discovered this there:

• 62% of personal travelers use search engines as the number one source for travel information. Google/OTX, Traveler’s Road to Decision 2010, U.S, Sept 2010

• 51% of business travelers use mobile devices to get travel information, more than double the rate of two years ago. Google/OTX, The Traveler’s Road to Decision 2011

• 46% of personal travelers are watching travel-related videos, versus 36% two years ago. Google/OTX, The Traveler’s Road to Decision 2011

Adwords Stats (non-travel)

• Over 89% of traffic generated by search ads is not replaced by organic search results when ads are paused. Google, Search Ads Pause Study, Global, Jul 2011

• Two-line sitelinks increase click-through rates by more than 30%*. Google Internal Data 2011, *Compared to standard Adwords ads

Video ads can help your Brand Search:

• Consumers exposed to a YouTube homepage ad are 437% more likely to engage in a key brand activity on the same day than those unexposed.

• Americans with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more are not only twice as likely as others to make entertainment and leisure purchases, and more than three times more likely to spend more.
• Effectively, 50% to 60% of all expenditures in the travel world come from these people.
• 65% of affluent Americans, who account for just 21% of the population, have a passport, compared with about 37% of all Americans.
• Seventy-six percent of those surveyed planned to take a vacation this year.
• In the last year, 83% of survey respondents took a trip of any sort, spending an average of $2,849 per journey, and 55% stayed at hotels with ratings of four or more stars.

Travel sites received .3% of referrals from Facebook (in other words, Facebook sent 3.4B visits to website and only 8.3M to travel sites).

Likewise, Travel sites are sending a decreasing amount of their visitors to Facebook:

While the research shows a positive correlation between visits to Facebook brand pages and conversion, they also show a minimal overlap between brand’s Facebook pages and the same brand’s website: <10%

• On average for the travel industry, click-through rates from a mobile device are 5.82%, compared to 3.56% from a normal computer based search.
• For the travel industry, mobile search remains small, with just 4.2% of total searches.
• The Cost Per Click (CPC) of mobile traffic is also 65% less than a standard computer search.

However the picture is markedly different for conversion rates on mobile, which were found to be 49% lower than from fixed-line computers.

The results demonstrated an increase trust in the brand:

Read the entire article and see more charts and graphs on their website.

• 60% of mobile consumers are looking for hotel reservations tonight or tomorrow night;

• 90% of mobile bookings take in some of the next six nights (i.e. tonight, tomorrow night or the following four nights);

• 90% of mobile consumers book one to three nights; and

• 95% of mobile consumers book one room.

Flash sales in the travel and tourism industry are becoming more popular:

• 25% of travelers booked a travel service because of an unexpected e-mail. Last chance sales and high-urgency offers are also becoming more popular.

How Important is Social Media?

• 46 percent of active travelers maintain a page on a social site.
• 91 percent of those are on Facebook.

But, only 9% of travelers say they have made a travel decision based on information from a social networking site.

It was a fast-paced and informative presentation. Thanks Haley.  These are my hastily scribbled notes:

Vacation Rental Search Becomes More Popular:

• 42% Year to Year growth for popular vacation rental queries at Google.com
• 34% growth in overall travel terms

10.2 sources being used by travellers in 2011 for their travel decision making process

• 27% read email from a travel company
• 85% searched with a search engine
• 49% searched online hotel reviews
• 37% read online travel reviews
• 25% read online comments

Travel Purchase Timeframe and Planning Window: Most travellers began thinking about the travel purchase at least one month before taking their trip.

• 8% 4-6 months before
• 24% 2-3 months before
• 21% 1 month before
• 10% 3 weeks before

Affluent Travelers:

• 80% of affluent travelers actually comparison shop “always or frequently”
• This is more than personal or business segment travelers
• The amount spent on the travel positively correlates with amount of research
• “Research intensity increases with travel spend”

Google +1 causese in uptick on Click-thru-rates… more data to come out of Google soon.

Mobile:

• 1/2 of Americans will have smartphones by end of year
• 29.7M mobile travel researches by 2012 in US
• 74% increase in Mobile bookers from 2010-2012 estimated
• 19.5% of queries in Google are on a mobile phone in the hotel and accommodations category (BlizzardTracker data shows that at 11%)
• 377% of year-over-year increase in query volume
• 844% in year-over-year increase in click volume
• Vacation Rental specifically had an increase 2X the volume increase for general travel.
• 9 out of 10 searchers have taken action as a result of a smartphone search

Where People spend time:

• 5% of time spent on search results pages
• 95% of time spent on rest of website

Display Advertising to grow radically:

• $10.2 Billion in 2010
• $15.9 Billion estimated in 2014
• $200 Billion estimated in 10 years
• Search and Display advertising together provide a 220% lift in conversion rate over search alone

YouTube:

• 38 Million videos uploaded every month
• 150 years of YouTube video consumed every day
• 40% of all web traffic is online video
• 90% of all traffic will be online video by 2014 (predicted)
• Average views watch 300 minutes of online video a month
• Travel enthusiasts watch online video:
• 62% of travel enthusiasts watch online video on YouTube
• 70% of travel enthusiasts who watch video watch when choosing a travel destination
• 69% of travel enthusiasts who watch video watch when choosing lodging accommodations in a destination
• 2 Million travel related results on YouTube
• 250Million daily impressions within the travel interest category of YouTube

Social Media

• 18% of consumers begin decision making process on social media
• 40% of consumers who use search in their decision making path use social media to complete their decision
• 67% say they trust online reviews as much as word-of-mouth recommendations