Reader Eye Tracking

Quite a few reports have been published about eye tracking and how it translates to ad visibility and click throughs. From my quick browse through the Internet, it seems that there are conflicting views on it and if you have read my previous analysis on the visual breakdown of Adsense optimised sites, not all the publishers position their ads in the way the reports tell us. So which one is right? Let's investigate:

1. F Shaped Pattern

Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F's top bar.

Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F's lower bar.

Finally, users scan the content's left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F's stem.

Well, from here, it's obvious that readers are drawn to pictures if it's in the sea of words, to the extent of bullet points.

2. EyeTrack III

This is more towards news sites but it could be useful to us as well:

The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.

Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page — especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right.

Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning.

A headline has less than a second of a site visitor's attention. For headlines — especially longer ones — it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers

I noticed that in a news site where it's full of words, readers are drawn towards bolded headlines with attention grabbing contents.

3. Search’s Golden Triangle

The key location on Google for visibility as determined by the eye activity in the study is a triangle that extends from the top of the results over to the top of the first result, then down to a point on the left side at the bottom of the “above the fold” visible results. This key area was looked at by 100 percent of the participants. In the study, this was referred to as the “Golden Triangle”. Generally, this area appears to include top sponsored, top organic results and Google’s alternative results, including shopping, news or local suggestions.

Looks like our eyes are trained to just ignore the white space in search results and focus on the content itself but only for the top half of the page. This could actually mean that if the first half of your article is not interesting enough, readers will just leave the site and not come back again.

4. Etre

Heat maps use a graded colour scheme to show visual activity. Warmer colours reveal areas that most users looked at, while colder colours show areas that few users noticed. Black reveals areas that no one looked at. Note that the large, centrally-placed advertisement for £4.99 DVDs is not highlighted.

Well from here, it seems that graphical ads may not appeal to readers anymore since we have been trained to ignore flashy pop up ads and all.

Anyway, this might not be entirely correct, but I superimposed all the above picture into one to see if there are any common agreements between the reports:

And the results can be summarised as follows:

So what do you think of this?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 2:08 am and is filed under Adsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.