Eye-Tracking
March 21, 2023
What Is Eye-Tracking?
Eye tracking is a type of neuromarketing research technique which measures the way that people’s eyes move in order to discover what attracts their interest and attention.
There are various ways of eye-tracking, but they all help to understand how consumers perceive the environment, an advertisement or a product and determine what drives their decision to buy or take action.
When to use Eye-Tracking
Eye-Tracking has many uses for neuromarketing and can be used to reveal conscious and unconscious attention towards different aspects of website design, advertisements (including static and video), product packaging, brand logo design, and any other visual aspect of your brand or product that you want to understand better.
Ultimately, Eye-Tracking can tell you what aspects of the visual display are grabbing the user’s attention (or are being ignored), what aspects are confusing the user, and how quickly aspects of the visual display are being recognised. In addition to being extremely effective in revealing insights related to the conscious and unconscious processing of visual displays, eye-tracking is relatively inexpensive and easy to administer.
Can eye tracking be used to measure emotions?
The amount of time an individual spends looking at something tells us how important or salient it is. There is a phenomenon known as negativity bias, which is when threatening or unusual or sometimes unwanted stimuli receive fast initial attention, and then if the environment is safe, they move on to attend to positive items of interest. So yes, eye-tracking can certainly tell us about what people like and don’t like. Combining eye tracking with facial emotion analysis and questioning is a winning combination to give us the full story behind the emotions.
Can it be done online?
Yes, it can. Online eye-tracking is a relatively new development and can be used in large samples of consumers across the world. It works by accessing the user’s webcam and tracking their eyes while they view a visual display such as an advertisement. This technique is dependent on the quality of the user’s webcam; therefore, larger samples are needed to obtain good-quality eye-tracking recordings.
