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3 Hot Marketing Tips from Heat Map Analysis (images)

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Over the past few years many marketing research firms have been using eyetracking technology to learn more about how people view and process information online.  This can be extremely useful data for optimizing many types of B2B Internet marketing.  Here's a quick summary of the major takeaways of the eyetracking research I have seen:

Issue #1: People scan but do not read.  Look at these eye tracking maps.  Clearly no one is reading all of the text, but rather people scan the page in both a vertical and horizontal way.

Solution #1: Use short sentences, bullet points and bold text. If people scan text, just adjust your content to take advantage of that.  Keep everything as short as possible.  Use bold text to highlight key messages.

b2b_marketing_eyetracking

Issue #2: Images get a lot of attention.  I noticed this first a few years ago when I was doing some analysis of my email marketing and looking
at the click through rate on the emails I was sending.  I started to look at which links in the emails people were clicking on and I noticed that people loved to click on images.  In fact, people even clicked on images that were not obviously linked to anything.

Solution #2: Use images effectively.  If people are going to give images more attention than perhaps they deserve, make sure you use them effectively.  All your images should work towards the goal of the page.  If it is a landing page, they should help convince people to submit their information.  If you are creating an email, the images should convince people to click on them.

landing_page_b2b_marketing_eyetracking

Issue #3: People rarely scroll.  Anything "below the fold" - things that are not visible when you first open the page because you need to scroll down to see them - will only be viewed by about 50% of the people who visit your page. 

Solution #3: Put important content above the fold.  Since anything below the fold will only be seen by about half your visitors, make sure your best content is above the fold, and when possible the page is not very long.

b2b_marketing_google_eyetracking

Note: Eyetracking images courtesy of marketingsherpa.com.

 

internet marketing kit


Posted by Mike Volpe on Fri, May 18, 2007 @ 09:48 AM

COMMENTS

If you like heat maps you would probably like http://crazyegg.com/

posted on Sunday, May 20, 2007 at 10:59 PM by skarld


Actually, in all of our eyetracking studies we frequently see that people WILL scroll if the design is effective -- but it depends on the design and content of the page. If you have good design and content above the fold and you indicate that there is more content below, people will scroll.

posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 at 3:59 AM by Greg


And to add to Greg's comment - yes people definitely do scroll so long as they're looking for "more of the same" or are convinced for some reason what they want is somewhere on the page.
This concept of "put everything important above the fold" tends to make developers put -everything- above the fold, and that just makes the page too complex for visitors to find what they want, and guess what? They leave, without scrolling.
However, if you can get them into the habit of scrolling, with partial but interesting information above the fold (such as only one headline and image visible), then there's a good chance they will keep scrolling.

posted on Sunday, May 18, 2008 at 11:06 PM by Trisha


I think it makes a lot of sense and it is something I have been doing effectively with my website. A lot great tips and tricks for Hubspot.
Thanks guys!

posted on Tuesday, May 27, 2008 at 2:14 PM by Sean


good clarification

posted on Saturday, July 05, 2008 at 8:55 AM by RAJARSHI GHOSH


Good to see science backing up common sense. Interesting about people automatically clicking on images though. With the blog culture being so wide-spread I doubt the lack of scrolling when people find a page they like.

posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 11:41 AM by Fred Campbell


I love your blog. very good info.

posted on Saturday, September 27, 2008 at 2:27 PM by jini Pinto


Great source of information. I actually have downloaded your Internet Marketing whitepaper and am learning a lot of things from it. People reading your blog must link to it to have it always on top of SERPS as small business owners canNOT survive in these tough global economic conditions without knowing/having these useful resources. 
 
Thanks.

posted on Friday, November 28, 2008 at 1:08 AM by Alex


Great article. All of this is a common sense, but people always need to be reminded as there is so much that one needs to know when developing a web site.

posted on Monday, February 16, 2009 at 10:12 AM by peter


Forgot to mention, here they have a nice comprehensive article on heat map too. http://www.maxi-pedia.com/heat+map. And here is one more link to a site where a guy describes how you can make one for your web site http://blog.corunet.com/english/the-definitive-heatmap

posted on Monday, February 16, 2009 at 10:18 AM by peter


Sorry, the first link did not make it through, so I am trying to fix it here: 
 
 
 
http://www.maxi-pedia.com/heat+map

posted on Monday, February 16, 2009 at 10:19 AM by peter


Great post. Excellent pointers on how to correct each issue. Thanks

posted on Friday, February 20, 2009 at 6:28 PM by Melissa Rennie


You know, one of the first things they teach you in art school is proper composition. We would analysis paintings by Rembrandt, Mondrian and others to understand how a viewer navigates the spatial elements of any given work.

posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 10:43 AM by Michael Cucurullo


When you place eycatcher with a promise for more info on the top site visitors are also more likely to scroll and you don't have to place all your important content on the top, what would be very head heavy.

posted on Friday, July 17, 2009 at 8:33 PM by Peter


Comments have been closed for this article.