Online Readers: What are they actually looking at when they visit a website?

This article combines two reports written by my students after going over the Standard/Poynter Eye-Tracking Project’s results posted here: http://www.poynterextra.org/et/i.htm

Stanford/Poynter Eye-Tracking Project

In 2000, Marion Lewenstein (Professor of Communication, at Stanford University) and the Poynter Institute researchers initiated the Stanford/Poynter Eye-Tracking project on online news reading behavior. It was the first project to introduce the idea of using eye-tracking equipment (SMI Eyelink system) to measure the eye movement over areas on a computer screen in conjunction with the application software for collection and analysis of observational data, which was written by the Advanced Eye Interpretation Project at Stanford University.

There were 67 subjects (with only 66 subjects’ data used, one was discarded because of unreadability) enrolled from two cities, from the states of Florida and Illinois. All participants were set up with head gear that recorded eye movement data while they read online news web pages. The research team collected images 60 times per second, and recorded each fixation point, the length of time for each fixation, and the order in which each fixation was generated.

The results of this study surprised many people in the industry. In fact, one of the findings was that a large percentage of the study participants look first to text, especially for news briefs and captions, which was just the opposite of the generally accepted notion that graphics and photos represent the first entry point for readers.

Other findings of the study are highlighted here:

Text Attracts Attention Before Graphics:
Of users’ first three eye-fixations on a page, only 22% were on graphics, and 78% were on text. In general, users were first drawn to headlines, article summaries, and captions.

Banner ads fared quite well.
Banner ads indeed did catch online readers’ attention — a notion that went against current thinking. 45 percent of banner ads were viewed by test subjects and the average fixation period was 1 second. This time is long enough for readers to perceive the banner’s message.

Online news users “do know how to scroll”
For articles on a news site, if a Web user has clicked to get to the page, chances are high that the article will be read, because the headline or blurb that led the user to click to the page gives enough information to the user that he/she knows in advance it’s something worth reading.

Visitors do have the habit of Interlaced Browsing
Users frequently alternated between multiple sites:

they would read something in one window

then switch to another window and visit another site

and then return to the first window and read some more on the first site; possibly to turn to the second window again later in the session

Insights gained from the study

Improve Headlines and Briefs
Be straightforward and efficient with headlines. Recognize that getting too cute may actually turn off online users, who just want to quickly discern if a story is worth reading.

Edit online photos and graphics
Use an appropriate photo with a single focus or single subject, or crop the image tighter to help the user focus on the main detail.

The best of both worlds
It may be necessary to deliver two versions of the story: a high-end graphically intense presentation and one that is bare-bones and designed with both wireless and low-end computers in mind.

Reconsider animated banner ads
If a banner is animated, every animation frame must have the brand name included. Not doing so can mean the consumer will look at the ad but not comprehend who placed the ad, because the average fixation period only one second.

Conclusions:

The results of this study echo what Google has experimented with on the Internet ever since it launched its Google AdWords Program (Google’s own online advertising program) by using text-based advertisements rather than graphical ones. Google’s results do indicate that the effectiveness of pay-per-click text advertisements is higher than graphical advertisements for the click-through rate because online visitors tend to read text rather than look at graphics. In my view, this can be explained by the fact that the primary motivation of people going online is to “search and collect” information, and so they tend to “read” more on this medium when compared with other medium like TV and magazines.

My challenges to the test results:

One of my criticisms is that objects in this experiment are too focused in two cities within one country, and no information on how they were recruited. The failure to achieve “random sampling” in the experiment defeats the possibility to generalize the results to the general online population.

It is suspected most of the subjects are frequent online news readers and thus already have the tendency to “read” text rather than looking at other graphical elements of a website. Therefore, the test results are not conclusive.

Tags: banner advertisements, banner advertisements Vs text advertisements, Google AdSense, text ads, banner ads Vs text ads