Eye Tracking Optimisation

One of the most useful tools for online marketers is a heatmap. A heatmap gives a visual representation of the parts of your web page that get the most attention from visitors. Typically, the upper parts of the screen are the areas that are looked at the most, and areas that are off to the side or at the very bottom of the screen are usually ignored.

Heatmaps and eye-tracking software can be used to optimize your website to ensure maximum conversions. If you have long, complex sign-up forms, unintuitive navigation or otherwise busy pages, then watching how people interact with your site is a good idea. Once you understand how people interact with your site you can start making changes to reduce your bounce rate and encourage more people to complete your conversion goals.

There are many ways of performing eye tracking, but the most effective way is to record people when they use your website. If you choose to do this, you will need to invite people to take part in focus tests and use special hardware to track their eye movements while they use your website.

An alternative is to use a software script that can be installed on your website to track mouse movements, providing similar feedback to full eye-tracking but allowing you to monitor all of your website's users, even if they are using the site in the comfort of their own home.

Eye tracking will help you to tell when a user gets confused and has to reread a line several times. It will also help you identify parts of your website that are driving users away. If many of your users get to a certain part of a web form only to abandon it, this is something that you need to fix.

Eye tracking is a good way to figure out what attracts people's attention and what they tend to skip over, but it is just one metric; indeed, it is not the only thing that you should rely on. In addition to eye tracking you should perform other tests as even the different colours used on call to action buttons can have a noticeable impact. Understanding what attracts attention is just one part of the equation when it comes to improving conversion rates.

Eye tracking is an objective and scientific way of testing how people engage with the information you give them. You will need a large sample size to get definitive results, but it is worth the effort and will pay for itself many times over once you action on the data.