Loca­tion based mar­ket­ing has become a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­egy. With that in mind, we wanted to exam­ine how peo­ple inter­act with search results from Google Places list­ings to answer these questions:

• Where do searchers look on the page?
• Does it make a dif­fer­ence if a list­ing has reviews?
• Do peo­ple really look at the map?
• Is Google’s Golden Tri­an­gle still applicable?

Using the Tobii eye track­ing tech­nol­ogy in our Toronto office’s Tive­Tank™ research lab, we put Google Places busi­ness list­ings to the test. We also ran the study online and mapped vis­i­tor click behav­iour. In the study, we cre­ated a sce­nario that included searches across four cities, on a vir­tual road trip.

We looked at the impor­tance of social sig­nals in a Google Places list­ing, the effect of thumb­nail images, and what hap­pens when a list­ing offers more click­able assets.

Here’s an exam­ple “heat map” from the study that shows the aggre­gated results of where peo­ple were look­ing on the screen.





The full results of the eye track­ing and click map­ping research will be released in a whitepa­per exclu­sively to Media­tive sub­scribers on Novem­ber 5^th. The whitepa­per will include heat maps, click maps, and analy­sis of the results with rec­om­men­da­tions on mak­ing the most of your Google Places listing.

Sub­scribe now to receive this valu­able insight.

Con­tact us for a free con­sul­ta­tion about your company’s online mar­ket­ing strat­egy. To see more of our whitepa­pers and research, visit www.mediative.ca/research


Biography / Resume : Karl joined Mediative’s service delivery team in 2008. A year later, he moved to the company’s research department where he conducted online surveys, eye-tracking studies, one-on-one interviews and usability testing. Most recently, he transitioned to the marketing department. Before Mediative, Karl worked in sales and marketing. In 1997, he caught the digital bug and became the original “webmaster” for Roland Canada Music. Around the same time, he began teaching the relatively new topic of Internet marketing to college and university students. Karl’s insatiable curiosity and drive to get to the core and substance of every situation has served him well in his various roles at Mediative.