Here is my attempt at a recap on making the #1 article across all sections on Digg, on August 17th. I wish I had been able to do this sooner, but I have been terribly busy at work, not to mention in Michigan watching my Mountaineers beat the Wolverines. I’ll talk more about that in another post.
This is the picture that made #1:
Quick Facts on my Digg Post here. These numbers are total numbers to date starting from the day it was submitted to Digg, August 16th.
92,470 Pageviews and 81,224 Unique Views (just for the How to get Fired from Dairy Queen Picture)
2:23 Average Time on Page (I am surprised it was this high)
Ever wonder what a #1 article on Digg looks like in terms of analytics? Here is what my Google Analytics looks like:
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A colleague of mine passed me this study in an email today, I am surprised that I have not seen it before. Nonetheless, it is a very interesting find that anyone in the Search industry should read.
Cornell University did a study of 397 search queries to determine eye tracking patterns for Google results. They used undergraduates students to perform searches in areas related to movies, travel, music, politics, local, and trivia. The picture below is a representation of the results they found.
While this study only covers organic/natural results, not paid, and does not include anything past the first page, I don’t think it would be an outlandish assumption to say that these trends also hold true for those two areas as well. It is obvious from this heatmap image, how important rankings are and specifically being “above the fold”. I would be very interested to see Cornell repeat this study after a few years and see if there is a pattern change of how users look at search results. Maybe users would become accustomed to seeing “spammy” results at the top of the page for certain queries and start to naturally shift focus to lower results. Or, the results could be similar. Anyway, its food for thought.
Link to original study
