The research discussed here may seem innovative at first glance, but nothing could be further from the truth! The first attempts at eye tracking were undertaken in the late 19th century by French researcher Louis Émile Javal. Of course, they didn’t focus on tracking the eyes of people navigating the internet. They investigated how people read the written word, which words attract the eye for a particularly long time than others, and which words act like a blinding magnet—simultaneously drawing the eye and causing the reader to see nothing beyond the word.
Previous and more recent marketing research based on eye tracking has shown that people navigating the web pay the most attention to only a few lines of content read from left to right. This should result in placing important information at the very beginning of the text, as close to the left edge as possible. Another important issue is highlighting important elements by bolding or underlining them, as it turns out that recipients don’t read the entire text but only select the most characteristic elements. Eye tracking studies conducted over the past few years also reveal a very interesting trend: one type of advertising, banner advertising, is significantly losing interest. This is most likely due to the fact that most users have become accustomed to the barrage of ads and their brains no longer pay attention to them, treating them as obstacles to be bypassed in order to read the rest of the tracked text. The selection of images to accompany the presented content is also crucial. Research shows that our potential audience is more receptive to images featuring a person looking directly at the camera. The amount and placement of text on a website plays a significant role in its reception. It turns out that both too much information/text density and too little of it negatively impact a potential audience’s ability to absorb information.
