14 DAY TRIAL // With a number of reports on the advertising market for social networks, researchers from Oneupweb set out to find if ads on these sites actually worked and if the users viewed them. The findings should surprise no one; search ads are much more useful than other types of display or text ads even on social networks. The study used eye movement tracking technology to see what portions of the screen the users viewed the most and for how long.
“We wanted to know if people actually look at ads when they are on social sites like Facebook and YouTube. Or in the case of Twitter, where will they likely look for those ads when they do begin to appear,” explains Oneupweb CEO and Founder Lisa Wehr. “We found that not only do users spend time viewing paid ads on social networking sites, they often look at these ads before actual search results.”
The study found that search ads in social networks could be very effective with as much as 65 percent of the subjects engaging with the ads in the first 10 seconds after their initial search. Other results also differed from the way people behaved on regular search engines as the report says that ads were looked at after viewing the first two search results but often before the third or fourth ones.
The importance of the results is also more homogeneous as the data shows there is little difference in the time spent viewing any of the first four results on either Facebook or YouTube. On Twitter, which has no ads, half of those studied found results satisfying when searching for a brand.
“Since search engines became the main way that people conduct searches for businesses, products and information, we’ve been under an assumption that people search a certain way. On search engines, a viewer’s eye starts at the top left hand side of the page, moving downward and slightly to the right,” explains Wehr. “Therefore, they are likely to click on just the first few search results that appear at the top of the page. But this just isn’t the case on social networking sites.”