Eye tracking and Google Adwords

This eye tracking technology is just fantastic. There are lots of companies selling this service and for good reason (just look at the sponsored links when searching for eye tracking). I wish I could afford this for the Google Challenge (i.e. for optimizing the landing page)!

It is, on the other hand, quite worrying if you are using AdWords. Take a look at the video below (from Google's Official blog). It seems that nobody looks at the right column of advertisements. I bet we can catch some of it with our peripheral vision, though. But I guess the lesson here is to bid high in AdWords because you want to be on top of the organic search. That's where the gold is. 

I found yet another interesting study by Think Eyetracking suggesting that users are getting used to Google results. The image below is a heat map of eye movements on a Google result. Users are getting smarter and more efficient with time. How does it affect the internet marketers? We have less and less time to catch the user's attention. And again: bid high on AdWords! 

Any other suggestion?

Advergaming

Adverwhat? Yes, advergaming. Games sponsored by corporations.

It started long ago with some floppy-disk based games (?), and it came a long way from there.  

Advergaming can happen in a variety of ways. You can find billboards on a race track of your favorite racing game; sponsored drink machines in simulation games; brand experiences like "driving an Audi" in Grand Turismo games or impersonating Noid (80's Domino's Pizza mascot) in an adventure game.

At first one could think games target a very limited audience - mostly geeky teenagers maybe.  But the truth is that there are lots of other geeks gamers out there in other age groups. More than 30% of the online gaming audience is between 35 and 49 years old.

Although studies prove that the games audience to be more mature than you would think, Volvo has pushed it perhaps a little too far. They've launched an advergame for their new TRUCK line. You can actually drive around on their new "FH16" truck. How effective do you think the campaign is? Do you think they are actually reaching their target customers? I'm not so sure but at least it's a fun little game. :)

As I know we all have plenty of free time on our hands, you can find a list of advergames to explore here:

http://www.adverblog.com/archives/cat_advergames.htm

Where are we?

In which box does the IM class fit into?

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The new direct-link to consumers: BLOGS

This fast-paced, ever-growing new channel never fails to surprise me. The power of blogs is amazing. Any "Joe Doe" can start a blog and write about anything - me included; yet it is changing the way businesses operate and interact with consumers.

Back when I worked for Nokia we had this internal joke: "if you want something changed in a phone you have a better chance of being heard by the program manager if you blog about it". And that was almost true. The program manager used to sit and read all major gadget/phone bloggers. That's how important this new channel is. It has shortened the distance to the end-user. 

And obviously, this is not a one-way street. Learning the power of this new media many companies are using it to communicate back to consumers in a friendly and direct way (e.g. http://thenokiablog.com/; http://googleblog.blogspot.com/). Others are even hiring "professional" bloggers to do their PR. 

In sum, whatever your company is doing: keep an eye out for what bloggers are writing about!

Old but interesting article: Blogs Will Change Your Business