How to use Eye Tracking to boost engagement

What if I split

a sentence onto two separate lines, for no apparent reason?

Why would I do that? Maybe I did it to confuse you. Maybe I’m deliberately trying to surprise or annoy you, in order to make you feel invested enough to read the remainder of my article. Perhaps I’m trying to determine myself as an unreliable narrator, giving me a license to do all types of tricks on you throughout the rest of this article.

Or maybe I unexpectedly split a sentence onto two separate lines to show you the importance of eye movement. Let’s take a glance at two more examples.

Consider poetry. If you open a book—any book—you’re likely to seek out inside the precise same visual pattern no matter length or genre. You’ll see an indentation on the primary line of a paragraph, a series of neatly justified lines of uniform width, then a dangling line which, alongside the marginally increased spacing and a newly indented line below, indicates the end of a paragraph.

But now believe books that flip that script, like poetry anthologies. Shakespeare’s verse introduces a replacement set of visual rules. For a few modern poets, the arrangement of words on the page may be a tool that will be utilized in any number of various ways. A swift Google image search of the poetry of E. E. Cummings adequately expresses this concept, except for further illustration, I’m forced to supply the following haiku:

Perhaps one reason

Poetry touches us so—

Its visual pull.

Did you notice how I included a dash? The primary sentence of this text gave your eyes no warning and allowed you to “stumble forward” unexpectedly onto empty visual perception.

But now, by priming you with a paragraph about poetry, telling you specifically to expect a haiku, adjusting line spacing and indentation, and including a couple of horizontal pixels, your brain reprogrammed your eyes to maneuver in a completely new way. After reading the second line, I’d venture that your eyes moved right down to that third line of the haiku far more smoothly than within the line break.

For one last example of the interaction between text and eye movement, let’s examine the garden path sentence. Think about your eyes as you read the subsequent passage:

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind. The old man the boat. Whenever a sailing venture was involved in an arctic seaside village, the pleas of the young men to venture out were roundly ignored on account of the big danger. (…)

Consider the middle sentence. Now, grammatically, this sentence is totally correct. The specific reason you were led “down the garden path” initially is just that your mind accepted “the old man” as the subject of the sentence, only to subsequently find that this phrase includes both noun and verb.

Now, consider the difference:

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind. The old man captained the boat. Whenever a sailing venture was involved in an arctic seaside village, the pleas of the young men to venture out were roundly ignored on account of the big danger. (…)

The addition of one, nine-letter word changes the meaning only slightly (from a plural to a singular noun), and yet the physical experience of the eye’s movement across the screen is dramatically altered.

So now that I even have your attention, let me tell you why all this matters.

The Reason Behind All The Trickery

What was the aim of the exercises above? Was it simply to mess with your mind?

My goal was to convince you of the inherent value of eye movement as a marketing paradigm, not by using facts or figures, but instead by connecting you on a private, experiential level to the fascinating science of eye movement.

Eye movement might not get on your radar screen as a marketer just yet, but it’s been a hot topic within the realm of psychology for many years. (Remember your experience above with the garden path sentence above? It seems that easy language tricks are more complex than you'll imagine!)

Quite simply, I’m advocating that marketers should take eye movement seriously.

Marketing contains a number of various conceptual paradigms. There are supply and demand, there are promotion and distribution, there’s brand management, there are segmentation and strategy, and now, of course—as if all this wasn’t enough—there’s digital marketing and social media.

All of those different perspectives are valid and important to think about. They're each a part of a whole. But another, equally valid piece of this complex puzzle is that the simple incontrovertible fact that marketing, particularly web-based marketing, comes down fundamentally to the buyer moving their eyes across a screen.

I believe that the movement of the eye is the most fundamental physical unit of selling.

It seems logical, then, that during a field dedicated partially to “catching” the consumer’s eye, it might also add up to live how successfully the attention is “caught.” Marketers need a way to understand whether or not the buyer did actually direct their attention where it had been meant to be directed.

Simply put, marketers need eye tracking.

The Uses for Eye Tracking

Perhaps you think that the way the consumer’s eye moves across the screen may be a design issue. Perhaps you think that this goal is best accomplished by emphasizing the artistry of advertisements, like the apocryphal Fibonacci spiral that creates Apple’s logo so visually appealing.

While the design is certainly a crucial component within the effort to catch the consumer’s eye, the very fact of the matter is that even the foremost beautifully designed content is often ignored or overlooked if it's not artfully placed and properly noticed.

In short, marketers need a tangible, objective way of measuring the immediate visual impact of their content. If you would like to work out when consumers are turning a blind eye [sic], you would like to get tracking.

Eye tracking began as a way of gathering data for laboratory research. In psychology, there's an extended and rich history of using eye movements to draw conclusions about how the mind works. Because the saying goes, the eyes are the windows to the soul.

However, in numerous fields, the last 20 years have seen a dramatic industrial revolution within the way that eye tracking is performed. The eye movements of a consumer can now be tracked in real-time using comfortable, portable, inexpensive, and unobtrusive technologies.

The consumer’s eyes can tell you things about your product that they could not even know themselves.

This data on the consumer’s visual and emotional responses, which can lie below the extent of ready awareness, can then be utilized during a host of various applications. Possible uses for eye-tracking data could include testing advertisements across print, television, and online platforms, also as testing product packaging, branding, and messaging both in and out of stores.

In essence, any time you would like to catch the consumer’s eye, eye tracking can tell you if you probably did.

Eye Tracking Deserves a better Look

Think back to the time when I split

a sentence of text onto two separate lines, without giving any warning. (I just did it again, I know.)

In this small and rather juvenile example, by twiddling with your visual expectations, I exerted some measure of control over you.

Now as every marketer has got to learn, it’s impossible to force the buyer to try to do what you would like them to try to do, to shop for what you would like them to shop for, to see where you would like them to see. No marketer can have complete control over the buyer, nor should they need to! But with eye-tracking, at least you'll prevent the buyer from having control over you.

Knowledge is power. When you’re ready to aggregate serious data on where the buyer is looking, once they look there, and the way they feel once they look, only then does one become ready to make decisions from an area of data, instead of guess and wonder how the buyer will react.

In the end, it’s time for you to start out brooding about eye tracking. All eyes are on you to make the next move!

Designate has consistently increased conversion rates for its clients by engaging the most sophisticated metrics and tools to acquire, engage, and convert target audiences across domains. Get in touch to know how we can boost your ROIs.