How do people read sites like eetimes.co.uk and elektroniknet.de? Wouldn’t it be really cool if we could track the movement of people’s eyes as they read electronics websites to understand what advertising works best?
A company called Poynter Online actually does this, and has posted a report about their latest Eyetrack III study for everyone to see! This really is worth reading: it found that when viewing news sites such as cnn.com, on average 68% of readers looked at a banner ad in the left hand column, 55% looked at a top banner, 34% looked at an ad on the right hand site and only 14% saw banner ads at the bottom of the page! Doubleclick suggests that ad click-through rates are typically less than 0.5%, anything we can do improve the performance of online advertising must be good!