Eye Tracking: Where and When To Market on Your Website
How do you make every page a marketing page? A recent post on the Wordtracker site offers advice on turning your website into a marketing goldmine. Of course, design like this isn’t necessarily based on eye tracking, but layout and placement of text on the page are important and need to be deliberate when creating your site.
First off, place your marketing on the page where it will be seen. Put some marketing on almost every page, including non-marketing pages, and not just the landing or closing pages. Include pages that are optimized for buying keywords. Position the advertisements towards the top of the page in plain view. If text ads are placed strategically, it can turn all of your pages into marketing landing pages. That includes pages that weren’t written to promote products necessarily, including category pages you wouldn’t otherwise have the time to work on and pages that don’t contain very much copy at all.
As we’ve discussed before, most visitors take only a few seconds to decide if they should stay or go. No matter what you do, many will leave quicker than they arrived. Because of this, it’s invaluable to maximize the response by putting your marketing where it will be seen within the first few seconds of a user’s visit. That means marketing must be visible on the page immediately, without requiring the visitor to scroll down.
Wordtracker’s post featured a number of eye tracking heat maps that displayed the typical F pattern we see for most pages. Site visitors start at the top left, scan down and right across headlines and main bodies of text. If you were to place your marketing just below a main headline and within a body of text high up on the page, it’s possible to get more eyes on what you have to sell.
They recommend to “always be testing.” Once you have marketing in place, you shouldn’t necessarily stop testing other content and positions. There are many tools, such as eye tracking of course, which can help you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Perhaps if you take a chance, results could improve.
Eye tracking and heat maps can be expensive though when it comes to consulting fees and/or testing equipment, so there are a few sites that will create heat maps based on users’ clicks (Crazy Egg and Click Heat).
But it’s important to note that learning to place your marketing is a never-ending process.
How to make every page a marketing page (and why you should)
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