7 Pack vs Organic vs ads

[Bishop]

Are there any studies regarding the popularity of the 7 pack vs regular local organic results or paid ads?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Bishop and welcome! Thanks for kicking it off with some great questions!

I have not seen any studies per say. There have been some informal eye tracking and heat map studies. Here are a couple previous related threads discussing too.

Heat Map - Local Vs Organic - Which Listing Gets the Eyeballs & Clicks?

Heat Map Study - New Review Stars, Do they Get the Clicks?

Disagreement with my client over organic vs G+L listing?

 

[Bishop]

Thank you SO MUCH Linda!

This is exactly the information I was looking for. Love heat maps. In fact, you answered another question before I asked it, how reviews with stars impacted clicks. Does authorship (photo) still work on the 7-Pack? I have authorship on my website and it does not show up in the 7-pack.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Where do you rank in the pack? Cuz author images only show up in the organic driven part of the pack. Depends in city and KW but usually it's the top 3. The lower listings are pulled from maps not organic, therefore the image won't show usually if you are D - G.
(But again it varies based on each specific SERP.)

So if author is set up right and you boost rank from D to B for example, your image should pop!

 

[Bishop]

Good to know!
I am currently "D", so I am on the cusp of seeing if the my authorship is working!!!

One additional question (since you have all the answers to my questions )
Is there an overall 7-pack ranking of a city? I know the 7-pack in based on your location, but is there a overall ranking for a city and if so how does this influence results for city segmented (ie zip codes) results?

 

[Bishop]

Bump for more eyeballs for the question above.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Good to know!
I am currently "D", so I am on the cusp of seeing if the my authorship is working!!!

Actually I think that has changed now and author images are not showing up in the pack at all.

One additional question (since you have all the answers to my questions )
Is there an overall 7-pack ranking of a city? I know the 7-pack in based on your location, but is there a overall ranking for a city and if so how does this influence results for city segmented (ie zip codes) results?

I don't even understand that question sorry.

If you set your location to city. And search for city + KW you get the pack. The pack is the pack. If you are searching from the north end of the city you could get slightly different results, esp if searching via mobile. But for the most part city + KW results will be the same pack.

I just tested. 1st with my location auto-detected. Then I set location and zip the next city over and did the same search (KW + city I'm in) and the pack never changed. Now if you search KW only without city, then it will change based on search location.

 

[Bishop]

Thank you Linda!
You did answer my questions...I didn't know if the 7-pack was influenced by location (i.e. if you are closer to a business location does location in your phone detect that you are closer to that business and move that business listing closer to the top).

And I did notice that 7-pack does not have authorship profile photos which is a bummer. I was working on that this week...now not much point.

 

[Dave]

Its a great question in my mind but one which is hard to tell and impossible to tell now. Its impossible now because if the clicks are organic either on the map or in an organic position google is going to report as Not provided. So who cares?

Well we have cared. We looked at it differently.

back when keywords were being reported and during maps we had some great serps for some smbs...and still do fortunately.

We ran very comprehensive adwords 24/7 so we had a denominator for all the searches on key phrases. that denominator supposedly told us ALL the searches for a phrase.

In some cases back in the day we had a one map for a discovery phrase (industry/city). We had the #1 organic result and a #1 adwords result.

that of course is danged great. What we discovered was that for those couple of discovery phrases we would see about 60-70% of all the searches in our adwords territory (which covered a big region). When the phrase was a recovery phrase ie a branded phrase with our business name with all of the same serps characteristics of one map, #1 in organic and #1 in adwords we might see 80% of the traffic in our region. Whoa that is high.

Now as we looked at other phrases with worse serps, maps positioning but the same adwords position we would see drops in overall traffic. Depending on the combo of positions we might see 20, 30, 40% of all the impressions in the region. it really depended on the combination of organic results/pac results. The worse those results were the lower the percentage of all the impressions in the region.

If we were first in a pac but it wasn't a one map we would get overall lower results in terms of percentage of traffic. If we were 2nd, 3rd or 4th in the pac we would get lower percentages. If we were in the PAC at the top but no organic results we would get lower percentages.

Roughly the adwords percentages (with a #1 adwords phrase) would come in at 8-15% of the total number of impressions. That was pretty consistent. The real variation would come in from the serps. Dominance in the organic and maps/pac position would generate a lot more traffic than dominance in the adwords position.

Were there more clicks on the map than on the organic results? I don't know for sure. The smb with those results has had great organic results before maps and the pac.

I have yet to see a study that correlates heat maps with clicks. On some of the heat map studies I truly doubt the veracity of the report.

Regardless though dominance in the organic and/or pac results are extremely worthwhile and drive traffic. Of that I'm sure.

Now I'll say this....the carousel view changes everything in my thinking. I don't have smb's in those areas. so I can't be certain....but in my mind that creates a whole new ball game. I'd love to see data on that.