Internet Ads – What works and what doesn’t [Eye Tracking/Usability Study]
Usbility guru, Jakob Neilsen along with Kara Pernice has launched his book, Eyetracking Web Usability that has findings from eyetracking studies that they conducted by bouncing infrared beams off a person’s retinas and recording head movements with a camera.
Interesting findings related to Internet Advertising
- Participants in the study looked at 52% of ads that contained only text,
- 52% of ads that had images and text separately and
- 51% of sponsored links on search-engine pages.
- Ads that imposed text on top of images got less attention
- People in the study saw 36% of the ads on the pages they visited!
Findings related to Images on webpages
- Users are more likely to grant a fixation to an image if they can tell from a peripheral look that they will be able to decipher it.
- Iconic images do not get looked at if they are diffi cult to make sense of quickly.
- People are more likely to look at images of an object set against a very simple background than against a crowded one
- When users select a link to a photo section, they usually expect some value-add in that area, such as larger photos or ways to zoom in.
- People also look slightly more at images of a single object— 26 percent—than at images with multiple objects—20 percent.
- People look at unrelated or somewhat related images just 14 percent of the time
