5 lessons marketers need to know about eye tracking technology.

Abi Roman

Eye tracking technology offers deep insight when it comes to packaging design, point-of-sale materials and promotional concepts and it can accurately reveal what grabs shopper’s attention and influences their behaviour. Business Development Manager, Mark Stern, uses it to ensure our clients’ campaigns are as effective as possible, here he shares his top five takeaways;

1. Our subconscious mind makes most of our decisions

5% of our purchasing decisions are made by our conscious mind whilst a massive 95% of our purchasing decisions are made subconsciously. For the marketing industry this means that getting the right marketing message communicated in the shortest possible time is vital to increase your chance to engage with consumers.

2. Minimise ‘dead weight’.

The way that our eyes travel across a poster, social post or packaging is linear. Meaning we move from one point to the next stopping along the way at objects of “weight” or points of interest.

The more content there is within an advert or piece of design the longer it will take for our eye to travel around it. This leads to the viewer concentrating less on each element before their attention is drawn to the next item.

So don’t overpopulate your images with multiple big loud messages. Make the ‘Call to action’ prominent, central and stand out on its own e.g. the word WIN in a large, bright and clean font.

3. Our eyes follow other people’s eyes

Below are two images that look almost identical. Except in the one on the right the woman’s eyes look at the product. As humans we are social animals and pick up on social cues. Here our eyes notice the woman’s gaze before we are conscious of it. Leading us to follow her gaze to the product. 

As you can see in the heat map, that means we will spend more time on the whole image and looking at the product. Improving our recall when we are purchasing.

4. Know the F-Pattern

As we read material we are unfamiliar with such as marketing emails, social posts, leaflets and POS, we follow a pattern called the F-Pattern. Starting at the top we read much of the first lines, then skim, then if we are still interested, we read a little more and finally we skim the rest of the article for important information. Forming an F as shown below.

Make your key messages short, concise and get much of the information in the first two lines.

5. Contextual clues help sales

This principle helps us to answer the age old question which is better: 2 for 1 or 50% off?

The answer is neither, both can be improved with context. Humans like contextual clues, however mostly those clues don’t have to be overly deep. Adding “Was £4.99, now £2.49” to 50% will make consumers believe that they are getting a better deal as they relate the percentage discount to what the price was before. This also applies to a 2 for 1 offer, “was £9.98 now £4.98 for two”.

All of these points would be easily illustrated using a controlled eye tracking and user analysis test like PromoCheck, our fast and simple browser based service that provides results in just a few days and for a fraction of the cost of traditional market research costs. PromoCheck is easy to implement and can be a truly cost-effective way to guarantee that your concept or campaign is set for success. Read our case study about how we helped Pilsner Urquell choose the right campaign for their beer here or get in touch to discuss using PromoCheck for your next campaign.