Didier Grossemy - Eye Tracking Home Page Study

Didier Grossemy Eye tracking Landing Page Study

Didier Grossemy expertise has strategically guided some of the largest companies in the world to the Internet space. From publicly listed Telecommunication companies, Shopping centres, Fashion designers, Insurance groups to launching 140 content managed websites for the “Le Meridien” five stars hotel group to implementing the first interactive environment for Columbia Tristar Films. There is a science to engineering complex database CRM to easy to use system for brands like Ferrari or launching powerful e-stores for the likes of the Oroton group.

As a specialist, Didier Grossemy says that the average American reads perhaps 50 words in 20 seconds. In partnership with eye-movement experts Eyetools Inc., MarketingSherpa conducted this study to find out:

1. How do people read landing pages?
2. Do eyes move in a uniform way?
3. What role do images play?
4. We knew that images draw the eye, but how much?
5. How important are they?
6. Which images are more compelling than others?
7. How do people move through a page?

Lesson #1. Visitors briefly scan — not read — pages.

Lesson #2. The upper left corner is always looked at.

It means the screen real estate directly below your site logo is high value property

Lesson #3. People look at people.

If there's a human face anywhere above the scroll on a landing page, all of your visitors' eyes will be drawn to it — probably well before they bother to read your copy. In fact, human faces can prove a real distraction from the conversion message.

You only have eight seconds maximum to convince at least 50% of your visitors to stick around in order to be converted. Why waste that time on any image that's not relevant?

Lesson #4. Keep your hero shot on the left side.

Also, people are fairly lazy, so if the hero shot is at the right side of the page, it's a bit harder for them to yank their eye back to read your copy to the left of it. In their minds, they already "read" it when they skipped from the top left corner of the page over to your hero shot on the right. Now you are forcing them to "go back." It's less than optimal.

Lesson #5. People read captions — but not all your regular copy.

Humans’ love affair with images extends to the copy immediately below them.

Lesson #6. Navigation bars waste valuable visitor attention.

Visitors' love affair with images extends to navigation bars — especially vertical ones, and especially ones on pages which don't have other significant images to distract attention.

Lesson #7: Hotlink wording can affect page-readership and conversions.

If visitors see that you've underlined or colored any text blue (to indicate a hotlink), you better make sure that text contains copy so powerful that it stands out on its own and can make conversions happen without any of the other body copy on the page being read.