In this article, we are going to be discussing eye tracking, which is an advertising research method that helps marketers determine which layout is going to be the most effective. When it comes to eye tracking, there is a lot to understand. We will be exploring how eye tracking works and what you can do to ensure that people are seeing what you want them to see first.
What Exactly Is Eye Tracking?
Eye tracking is the determination of where customer’s eyes go when they look at a specific piece of visual content. Because you only have a second or two to grab someone's attention in many cases, you have to be able to know where their eye line is going to go.
The way that you determine eye tracking is complex and usually requires experts in the field to be able to explain where the customer’s eye line is going to go with your product. Generally, you would hire a third party to take care of the research and figuring out the eye line, and then make your adjustments accordingly. Eye tracking is the most effective trend out of the current crop of trends capturing unbiased, subconscious data from consumers.
Eye tracking shows you, among other things, how consumers react to your marketing message and how they engage with it in real time. Eye tracking can give you information that you just won't get from any other source and has become one of the most popular tools for marketers today.
The Influence of Psychology
In today's world, competition is fierce and businesses need every advantage that they can get in order to attract consumers. Since a lot of business is done online, much of this marketing is focused on the web, even if a business also has retail locations.
One of the things that have been trending lately with marketers is the use of psychological tools to determine a customer reaction and gauge the level of their engagement to various products, marketing campaigns, visual aids and more.
As more and more research is done, marketers will begin to hone these skills even further, leading many to question how much of the use of psychology is ethical. Some of the tactics currently being employed by marketers include appealing to emotions, pointing out a few flaws as well as benefits of their products, offering exclusivity to their customers and of course, employing the “time running out, don't miss out on the deal” tactic.
Potential Problems Eye-Tracking Can Identify
Let's look at some of the problems that can be identified using eye-tracking. The first is identifying white noise or empty space with your visual media. But you also have to be aware of items that draw the eye but that are not important at all to the message. If you have a visual element drawing attention away from other parts of your website or media that are intended to convince, you may need to reduce the weight of those elements and increase the weight of the message.
Another thing that eye tracking can tell you is where you should be putting directional cues on your website. Directional cues are visual elements that direct the eye where you wanted to go. Good graphic designers will know how to create a page with the right directional cues.
One of the psychological techniques that marketers have gotten from eye-tracking is what it's called the F scan. The F scan is what people automatically do whenever they look at a web page or any other element. The F scan works just about everywhere. The way that people scan a page is by looking at the top then dropping their gaze down the left side of the page to somewhere in the middle scanning right and then dropping their gaze once again along the left side of the page. That's why it is called an F scan because it usually resembles the capital letter F.
Finally, you may have heard that your important website content needs to all be ‘above the fold’. The fold comes from a newspaper term which said that headlines needed to be above the fold. But that was because you can only see one side of the newspaper at a time. However, that is not the case with websites and eye tracking has shown that people actually do scroll down a little bit so you don't have to worry about being above the fold as much.
Eye Tracking and Various Types of Media
One of the things that you have to keep in mind when it comes to it is going to be different for each type of media that you are researching. Eye tracking will work for any type of media out there, but if you are interested in knowing where people's eyes go when you send them an email, it is going to be very different from where people's eyes go when they see your website or a large poster. If you plan on outsourcing the eye tracking to a company, you may have to do multiple studies depending upon how many different types of media that you are trying to get the customer to engage with.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that there is a great deal of benefit that can be gained from using marketing using eye-tracking in your marketing and advertising. Of course, getting a company to look at your materials and conducting studies to determine the eye tracking patterns is someone expensive, but you may be able to do much of the work yourself if you research the topic carefully.
You will find it by applying psychological techniques like eye tracking to your marketing and advertising; you will get customers to engage more in your conversions will go up. Psychology is used in most of the marketing and advertising today and you definitely want to have that data available because you can bet that your competitors will be using it.
