Eye Tracking:
The Potential In Marketing Research
When talking about the many advantages of eye-tracking and the uses of eye trackers in different industries, we have to include marketing and everything that entails; from advertisement to product placement to user experience and much more.
At Gazpoint, we have been developing eye-tracking software and hardware for more than a decade, and we’ve been able to notice and receive feedback from many of our customers on how solid research, done with eye trackers, can and has offered invaluable information and data which has helped in the advancements of many developments.
While eye-tracking is not the end-all-be-all of marketing research, the data and information that this process yields has a strong impact on further development, and it can be more accurate than some metrics that we often receive from other data trackers — clicks, views, and likes, to name a few.
Before we continue, if you are interested in learning more about what eye-tracking is, you can read more by clicking the button below.
What Is Eye Tracking?
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Why Use Eye Trackers in Marketing?
You could say that marketing makes the world go round. It would be an understatement to say that marketing is a necessary aspect of any business — crucial would be more like it. The right usage of marketing practices can be the difference between a company on its way to bankruptcy and an industry-leading enterprise that continues to exponentially grow.
Knowing the importance of marketing, we can understand how vital it is to apply the best possible formula in order to take the most advantage of your advertising channels and exposure. When you understand the psychology behind your target audience, engagement patterns, and where people tend to focus their gaze when looking at advertisements and other visual forms of marketing, you understand how to maximize your profits as a company and improve your customer’s experience in order to have them come back for more.
This is where doing marketing research with eye-tracking devices comes into play. There’s a vast amount of data that can be collected by creating different approaches to your research, which can be beneficial at the time you need to improve an aspect of any product.
Eye Trackers in Advertising
Posting ad banners and calls to action on your own website or social media is more than just designing the asset that you will use. Knowing where to place it, learning if your targeted audience will respond well to it, and making sure that your customer won’t ignore it are important bits of information that will affect your bottom line.
Let’s take a look at an example:
You were able to hire an outstanding designer who made an ad banner that can’t be improved by any means; in other words, it’s perfect. The banner fulfills everything; style, brand guidelines, sentiment, and everything in between. Now, after exposing your banner on your site, you notice that it has not received the attention or clicks that you wanted simply because it’s located in a section of your website or your homepage that your average customer does not look at for whatever reason.
Yes, you can continue to test locations and keep trying until one day, after months of trial and error, you find the best spot for the banner. However, by this moment, you probably already lost a lot of money in what could have been potential sales.
If you initially know where your targeted audience is focusing,and you have the data to back those claims, you can make that advertising campaign successful from the start.
The information that you can receive from doing research first with eye trackers to learn more about your potential customers’ behavior and approach can give you the upper hand to hit the ground running. This same information can help you determine if what you are putting out there is visually appealing enough to where people are drawn to it and react to what you are offering.
User Interface and Eye-Tracking
User interface, or UI, is an aspect of design used in many industries. Everything from interactive websites, social media, phone applications, video games, and more. These industries often use UI not only to provide information the user needs, but also to keep the user interested and focused.
Eye-tracking research can be done in order to put your product’s UI to the test. If you notice that there are certain sections more people focus on, then you can use those sections to plug the information you want to show the most.
Eye Trackers to Improve User Experience
Just like with UI, user experience (UX) is another facet of your product that you need to be aware of. If your potential customers don’t like to or can’t use your product due to a lack of intuitive processes or overly-complicated functionality, then you could experience a decrease in uses, clicks, or sales of your product.
The help from the data taken from research can allow you to define if your users are getting stuck in certain areas or are having a rough time defining what the next steps are for them to enjoy what you are offering them. These eye-tracking studies can help you define the hierarchy of importance seen from your customers’ eyes — if your product is easier to use, there’s a higher chance that you can rise above your competitors, especially if you are offering the same quality.
Learn how to choose the right eye tracker for you
Eye Trackers Revolutionizing Marketing
Eye-tracking devices and software can be some of your greatest allies when it comes to learning more about your potential customers. A well-thought-out test coupled with the right number of participants in your studies can give you a substantial amount of information that your R&D team can later use to improve on the final product. While eye trackers can’t tell you how your customers feel, they can show their visual focus, what are the most attractive things about your product, and more.
Some people might say that asking your potential customers directly about what they would like to see or how they would like to experience a certain product is all you need to move forward with development. However, you might be dealing with a skewed or biased perception that has been filtered by your potential customers’ thought process.
Benefits of Using Eye Trackers
When you have your participants work through your research naturally in a comfortable environment, they tend to be their most honest. This is why eye trackers are such a strong contender when it comes to researching behavior, interactions, and user experience.
Here are some of the benefits of eye-tracking results:
- Natural Behavior — the eye-tracking equipment is minimal making the environment less overwhelming.
- Subconscious Response — participants respond from a more instinctive place.
- Live Feedback — when performing the tests, you can receive a live feed from the participant’s reactions.
- Easy to Carry — the eye-tracking equipment is light and gives you the possibility of using in almost every environment.
- Correlation With the Subject — the data that you get from the eye trackers (i.e heat maps, areas of interest, dwell time, etc.) when coupled with a timeline or a recording of the participant, can give an accurate reaction to particular triggers or stimuli.
Other Areas That Can Benefit From Eye Tracking
The reach eye trackers have doesn’t stop with marketing and its derivatives. There are many other industries that have benefited and continue to benefit from eye-tracking research. Here are some of them:
Medical Research
Medicine has seen positive outcomes in studies related to people with down syndrome, strabismus, glaucoma research, and other conditions.
Gaming Industry
Videos games have been able to benefit from learning more about user experience and user interface in order to improve the final product that customers enjoy. At the same time, virtual reality (VR) has also seen the benefits of using eye trackers to learn more about how people traverse their environment.
Assistive Technology
Eye-tracking devices have proven to be an effective, powerful tool to help people with disabilities have another option to interact with the world around them. A person with partial or full paralysis can use their gaze as a pointer in order to interact with a computer.
Academics
By introducing other elements like eye-tracking data into academic research, it has provided studies to develop their inquiries further thanks to the access of fresh and new information from other perspectives.
Software Development
In today’s world, with so many new applications and software being developed, having an edge above the rest can make the difference. Eye trackers have been helping developers create the best UI and UX to satisfy their customers and make sure that their product is not only easy to use, but also has an appealing design.
