How Eye Tracking Research is Revolutionizing Advertising

How Eye Tracking Research is Revolutionizing Advertising

The success of neuromarketing has caused marketers to invest in other biometric technologies. Eye tracking technology has come to the forefront of this frontier. Because of these new technologies, marketers are no longer relying on their “gut feelings” to create strategies. Even more impressive, they are no longer relying on the stated opinions of prospects. Those opinions, aggregated through focus groups and surveys, still contain filters that eye tracking technology literally sees right through.

Real Time Answers

Eye tracking technology can follow visual behaviors as a prospect watches an advertisement. Results come in real time, meaning that the prospect does not have to recall or translate his behavior. In many cases, recall and translation tend to create less truthful interpretations of prospect behavior.

Eye tracking also tells a marketer if a prospect takes certain aspects of an ad into account. In many cases, people watching an ad completely miss something that the marketer deems essential. In order to impress the marketer, the prospect may lie about seeing the detail.

Gaze Plotting and Heat Mapping

The modern consumer has a natural “banner blindness” to ads that are placed around a website or hard sells that are inserted into advertisements. Gaze plotting technology helps marketers crack the code to see how to make prospects actually look at the part of the ad that is selling. Heat mapping can actually inform a marketer of the intensity of the attention.

Maximizing ROI

Eye tracking technology is one of the best ways for marketers to make a final choice between two or more ads. Not only can eye tracking assess the engagement of the target prospect, but it can also determine how those prospects interpret that ad. Marketers can then weigh returns against production costs and optimize company ROI.