Eye-tracking and Marketing

Eye-tracking and Marketing

Why every business should explore a good eye-tracking study.

With the ability to take a lot of guesswork out of testing campaigns, environments and creative visuals, eye-tracking software and heat maps can reveal some startling insights into increasing conversions (and avoiding sales killers) that can benefit every business.

Here at  Social Jaguar, we embrace the latest technology as part of our efforts to make customer insights and marketing strategies more accessible to businesses. Working with our experts to help you get the best from the behavioural science.

Here is a list of 3 eye tracking behaviours that give a sneak peek into common browsing patterns and elements of human behaviour that all marketers need to know.

Let’s take a look!

1. Beware of “Dead Weight” with Visuals

You don’t have to be an expert in UX (user experience) to understand the importance of a great visual layout in order to better customer experience on one’s website. Object “weight” (in the visual hierarchy) is a big determinant in what attracts eyes and mouse clicks. Here is a good example, a case study from TechWyse that examined the homepage of a truck service with a heat map shows that the main areas pulling the eyes, where not in the right area.

As you can see from the first test, the non-clickable “NO FEES” starburst was hogging a lot of attention.

 That’s no good because ideally you would want people to be focused on call to actions such as contacting you, or encouraging click through to buy a product or book a service. The star burst stands out so much that it actually is drawing people away from other more important elements, such as the phone number.

Take a look at the changes they made to alleviate this problem.

Much better!

The “Call Now” button clearly is getting a lot of attention over every other section on the page, which is great because it is how customers get started contacting the business.

When you are assembling a persuasive landing page, be sure the elements that “pop” are the ones that matter, and that you aren’t giving too much weight to visuals that don’t encourage customers to take action.

2. The Power of Directional Cues

Human beings have a natural tendency to follow the gaze of others, and we have been coached since birth to follow arrows directing us to where we should be looking/going. Consider the following example that included a page with a baby and a compelling headline for taking care of the baby’s skin.

It’s obvious that the baby’s face is drawing a lot of attention. (As a matter of fact, faces of babies and pretty women draw the longest gazes from all visitors.)

Unfortunately, from a marketing standpoint, this is a problem because the copy isn’t commanding enough attention. Now look at the browsing patterns when an image of the baby facing the text was used.

As you can see, users focused on the baby’s face again (from the side) and directly followed the baby’s line of sight to the headline and opening copy. (Even the area of text that the baby’s chin was pointing to was read more!) Visuals are an important part of a site’s overall design, but most pages can be optimized by including images that serve as visual cues for where visitors should look next.

3. The F-Pattern

F-pattern of reading that is common pattern across most screens. According to this study from the Nielsen Group, all across articles, e-commerce sites, and search engine results, people almost always browse in an F-shaped pattern that heavily favours the left side of the screen.

This coincides with additional research that shows people tend to view the left side of the screen overall far more than the right. The opposite was true for those users whose languages read from right to left. This is why most tested websites in the world (like Amazon) have placed a clear priority on the left sides of their homepages.

There You Have it!

Three of the many useful observations to note when planning your marketing designs.
We hope you found these insights useful. If you ever need a fast assessment of your marketing designs in terms of 'object weight' and eye pull, before you spend the large amounts to advertise, we can certainly help here at Social Jaguar.