info [ AT ] redcardinal [ DOT ] ie
Excellent Academic Study of Clickstreams
You can find a very good synopsis of a recent study by Hamburg University into Internet usage habits over at WebSiteOptimization.com.
You should check out the clickthrough heatmap for Google (Figure 5: The Golden Triangle – Eye Tracking on Google Results (Hotchkiss 2005)) which shows the importance of the top 3 positions in Google SERPs.
The synopsis contains some other good reference material also.
If you are interested in the original Hamburg University study (not a bad read if you have the time and interest) you can view it here.
[...] The dataset contained 36,389,567 search queries with 19,434,540 clickthroughs. While we all knew the importance of the top 3 positions in the Google SERPs, this analysis further reinforces that fact: [...]
Pingback by Clickthrough Analysis of AOL-data.tgz | Search Engine Optimisation Ireland .:. Red Cardinal — December 12, 2006 @ 9:25 pm
Richard, if you know of any more up to date studies in relation to on page clock patterns (heatmap example on article is great) I’d love to see other articles.
Comment by Dave in Toronto — November 30, 2009 @ 12:15 am
Statistics show that it is almost the same result to be 5th or on the second page of the results. About 80% of people stop after searching/visiting top 3 results.
Comment by Sanovnik — July 3, 2011 @ 9:07 pm