Lecturing on Eye Tracking (theory, applications and personal account) to Master students for a course in Advanced Consumer Marketing at Linköping University, Sweden. More info about the experiment at http://tmblr.co/ZabjQq19R8z26 or at http://www.slideshare.net/guyaderhugo/nrwc2014-closing-the-green-gap-what-can-the-retailer-do-inside-the-store-41209567

1. Eye Tracking
Hugo Guyader
hugo.guyader@liu.se

3. Eye tracking enables researchers to analyze people’s visual
attention reflected in their pattern of eye movements, called ‘gaze’,
point of regard’ or ‘scapath’.
It“measures the distance and angle of the reflection of infrared light
from the center of the pupil to determine the point of fixation of the
person”.
Wedel and Pieters, 2008
Optical tracking cameras record the pupil center location and the
infrared corneal reflection to measure the orientation of the eyes in
the visual environment.
Duchowski, 2007
Eye tracking devices record someone’s gaze, composed of two
salient eye movements tracked over time:
(1) saccades = rapid jumps of the eye to one location to another,
(2) fixations = longer and still moments of the visual field.
Wedel and Pieters, 2008

4. Devices
Stationary Eye Tracker
e.g. Tobii
Eye Tracking Glasses (ECG)
e.g. SMI
+ Analytical software
Eye Tracking

5. • Interactive role: eye tracker serves as an input
device, which is used by visually mediated
applications.
• Diagnostic role: eye tracker provides objective
and quantitative evidence of the user’s visual
and (overt) mental processes.
Duchowski, 2007
Eye Tracking
Application

6. Marketing pro-active research method for:
• choice and search behaviour,
• print advertising,
• public policy information and social marketing
information,
• television commercials,
• online usability and advertising,
• reading tasks in survey design,
• brand extension research, etc.
Wedel and Pieters, 2008
But also in neuroscience (attention, brain structure);
psychology (reading, scene perception, visual search,
natural tasks, auditory processing and other information
processing tasks); human factors (aviation, driving, visual
inspection, sports); computer science (interactive
system); ergonomics (design), ophthalmology, etc.
Duchowski, 2002
Research Applications

7. A few examples…
Hugo Guyader
hugo.guyader@liu.se

8. Scene Perception

9. Packaging

10. Retail Marketing
Packaging Design Features that impact visual attention:
- contour/shape (high slim product draw consumers’ initial attention better)
- high contrast (products that stand out)
- graphic design (easy to interpret)
- text element (negative influence on consumers’ initial attention)
Under High Time-Pressure
- Consumers accelerate information acquisition (= shorter fixations): they filter
information by skipping text (rather than images) on product packaging.
- Consumers adopt a processing-by-attribute strategy (= increase in
saccades between brands).
Under High Motivation
- Consumers slow-down information acquisition (= longer fixations): they skip
more pictorial objects (rather than brand names).
Pieters & Warlop (1999)
Clement, Kristensen, Grønhaug (2013)

11. Advertising

12. Print Ads
In a Yellow Pages study, consumers spent 54% more time viewing ads for
businesses that they ended up choosing. In general, the larger the ad, the
more likely consumers were to notice it.
Attention paid to an ad decreases by about 50% from exposure 1 to exposure 3:
the attentional process accelerates during later exposures.
Text vs Pictorial information
- Consumers pay three times more attention to text than pictures.
- Attention durations differ significantly across ad elements: longest for the
text, followed by headline, and shortest for the pictorial and the packshot.
- Most inter-element saccades start from or end on the packshot.
- Decreasing the size of pictorial, and increasing the sizes of promotion
(price) attracts more attention to the entire ad display.
Color and graphics
Color ads are scanned faster, more often, and longer than black & white ads.
However graphics do not capture initial consumer attention.
Rayner et al. (2001)Pieters, Wedel & Zhang (2007) Rosbergen, Wedel & Pieters (1990)Lohse (1997)

13. Pieters & Wedel (2004)Leven (1991)
Print Ads
Scanpath:
- Participants quickly scan an ad before attending to it in
detail.
- Consumers look first at the headline followed by the pictorial,
the text, and finally the packshot. After the initial visual scan of
the ad, half of the attention is directed at the bodytext.
- The brand object most effectively transfers attention to the
other elements. Little or no transfer from the pictorial to brand
and text.
- Brand familiarity reduces attention to the brand but increase
attention to the text.
- Center of ads fixated much more frequently than the sides.

14. Print Ads
Information processing and Memory
- Relatively to the ad elements size (in general, the brand is 10x
smaller than the pictorial and 5x smaller than the text), the brand receives
more fixations on its surface, followed by the text. But only an
increase in text surface produces a net gain in attention to the
ad as a whole.
- The number of fixations (not their duration), is related to the
amount of information a consumer extracts from an ad.
- The more visual attention, the better brand recall.
- Ads that are both original and familiar attract the largest
amount of attention and thus increase brand memory.
- Fixations to the pictorial and the brand systematically
promote accurate brand memory, but text fixations do not.
Wedel & Pieters (2000)Pieters, Warlop & Wedel (2002)

15. Web

16. Web
Mediative (2014)

17. E-Marketing
Ad Blindness: Almost no fixations within advertisements.
- Users process ad banners peripherally (not focused attention). They know usual
location & size of ads -> they easily ignore them subconsciously.
- While navigating on a webpage: if users are looking for a quick fact, they want to
get it done and are not diverted by banners; and if users are engrossed in a story,
they are not going to look away from the content.
- Users don’t fixate within design elements that resemble ads.
- 3 design elements attracting the users’ gaze: Plain text, Faces, Cleavage…
Content:
- Users do not read text word-by-word. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when
prospective customers are conducting their initial search.
- On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention so the
first couple words need to be real attention-grabbers
- Text, not photographs, are the entry point into home pages.
- Short paragraphs receive much more attention (x2) than long ones.
- They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.
Nielsen Group (2006, 2007)

18. E-Marketing
Website Design:
- Users spend 2/3 of their time viewing the left half of the page.
- The most important page elements should be showcased in the upper half.
- Larger headlines draw more visual attention than small. But underlined
headlines and visual breaks discourage people from looking at items beyond
the break.
- Lower parts of the screen, especially if the users have to scroll down,
receive modest viewing (only 19.7% of attention).
- The one-column story format perform better than multiple columns.
- The last element in a list often attracts additional attention.
- Ads in the top and left portions of a home page receive the most attention,
and placement near popular editorial content helps attract eyes to ads.
- Size matters too: big ads are viewed more.
- The more an ad looks like a native site component, the more users will look
at it. But users tend to ignore heavily formatted areas (that look like ads).
Poynter Institute (2004)Nielsen Group (2010)

19. E-Marketing
Decreasing backtracking
- Users do not only navigate on sites searching for information, but rather interact with an
online application to complete certain tasks.
- The usage of multiple windows and tabs replaced the ’back' button usage, posing new
challenges for user orientation and backtracking.
- Web browsing is a rapid activity even for pages with substantial content, which calls for
page designs that allow for cursory reading.
Visual vs. Verbal depicted choice set (Small vs. Large)
- Preference for visual presentation of choice sets, regardless of size or product category.
- If a choice set is too large (information overload, higher perception of complexity):
consumers are overwhelmed and opt-out of choice.
- Visual presentation is perceived to be an easier, faster and more enjoyable format
- Verbal presentation is perceived to be more precise.
- The choice process takes longer with verbal than visual depiction.
- Visual format is not the best presentation for large choice sets as the examination of
options is less systematic. Verbal description is a more methodological and careful
examination.
- In small choice sets, images produce greater performance than text in the search task.
Weinreich et al (2008)
Towing & Kahn (2008)

20. Survey

21. Time Travel…

22. Consumer Behavior
Hugo Guyader
hugo.guyader@liu.se
Eye Tracking Experiment

23. Study the impact of in-store information, green price tags and
greenwashing product assortment on the shopping behaviour of
supermarket customers.
Objective: offer a normal shopping experience, but with a green
servicescape (= items evoking countryside/agriculture were
displayed around the shelves).
2 experimental conditions:
- control group (46%)
- primed group (54%) — “The person you do the shopping for is
actually sustainable-oriented and prefer to eat organic food” (=
representative of “deep green” consumers who genuinely
search for green products).
Purpose

24. Convenience supermarket mock-up.
5 shelves: tomato sauce, kidney beans, coffee and
softeners.
3 product alternatives: classic, ecological, or fair-
trade.
Different variables: brand, price, packaging colors,
labels, information displays, décor, etc.
Eye Tracking Experiment

25. http://youtu.be/Mm0g8mVHffE

26. Analyses

27. Results
Gaze Map

28. Results
Focus MapControl Group

29. Primed Group
Results
Focus Map

30. Results
control group primed group
Fixation Time Average [ms]
0 20001000
Heat Maps

31. Results
control group primed group
Fixation Time Average [ms]
0 20001000
Heat Maps

32. Statistics

33. ✓ Retailers are the gatekeepers between consumers and eco-friendly
products. They can influence green consumer behavior.
➡ Retailers can attract consumers’ visual attention and increase the
sales of eco-friendly products through various practices:
✤ influencing consumers’ intentions to make green purchases,
✤ providing relevant information,
✤ orienting consumers inside the store, and
✤ offering an eco-friendly product assortment.
Managerial implications:
✤ use green-colored price tags to signal eco-friendly products to
consumers,
✤ avoid greenwashing practices (such as display of products with
misleading packaging) that can distract consumers from finding the eco-
friendly products they look for.
Findings

34. Eye Tracking
peripheral vision
visual field reduced
inaccurate
what measures to use?
time-intensive
experimental bias
drawbacks

35. References:
• Bojko, Gaddy, Lew, Quinn, & Israelski (2005). Evaluation of Drug Label Designs Using Eye Tracking. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society, 49th Annual Meeting. Orlando, FL.
• Chandon (2002). Do We Know What We Look At? An Eye-Tracking Study of Visual Attention and Memory for Brands at the Point of Purchase. Working
Paper, INSEAD, Fontainebleau.
• Clement, Kristensen, Grønhaug (2013). Understanding consumers’ in-store visual perception: The influence of package design features on visual
attention, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 20, 234–239.
• Dreze & Hussherr (2003). Internet Advertising: Is Anybody Watching? Journal of Interactive Marketing, 17(4), 8–23.
• Duchowski (2007). Eye-Tracking Methodology Theory and Practice, Springer-Verlag, London, 2 ed.
• Goldberg, Probart & Zak (1999). Visual Search of Food Nutrition Labels. Human Factors, 41(3): 425–437.
• Janiszewski (1998). The Influence of Display Characteristics on Visual Exploratory Search Behavior. Journal of Consumer Research, 25, 290–301.
• Leven (1991). Blickverhalten von Konsumenten: Grundlagen, Messung und Anwendung in der Werbeforschung. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag.
• Lohse (1997). Consumer Eye Movement Patterns on Yellow Pages Advertising. Journal of Advertising, 26(1), 61–73.
• Mediative (2014). http://pages.mediative.com/SERP-Research
• Nielsen (2006). http://www.nngroup.com/articles/f-shaped-pattern-reading-web-content/
• Nielsen (2007). http://www.nngroup.com/articles/banner-blindness-old-and-new-findings/ & http://www.nngroup.com/articles/fancy-formatting-looks-like-
an-ad/
• Nielsen (2010). http://www.nngroup.com/articles/horizontal-attention-leans-left/ & http://www.nngroup.com/articles/scrolling-and-attention/
• Pieters & Warlop (1999). Visual Attention during Brand Choice: The Impact of Time Pressure and Task Motivation. International Journal of Research in
Marketing, 16, 1–17.
• Pieters & Wedel (2004). Attention Capture and Transfer in Advertising: Brand, Pictorial and Text-Size Effects. Journal of Marketing, 68, 36–50.
• Pieters, Warlop & Wedel (2002). Breaking Through the Clutter: Benefits of Advertisement Originality and Familiarity on Brand Attention and Memory.
Management Science, 48(6), 765–781.
• Pieters, Wedel & Zhang (2007). Optimal Feature Advertising Under Competitive Clutter. Management Science, 53(11), 1815 - 1828
• Poynter Institute: Eyetrack III http://www.math.unipd.it/~massimo/corsi/tecweb2/Eyetrack-III.pdf
• Rayner, Rotello, Stewart, Keir & Duffy (2001). Integrating Text and Pictorial Information: Eye Movements When Looking at Print Advertisements. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 7(3), 219–226.
• Rosbergen, Wedel & Pieters (1990). Analyzing Visual Attention to Repeated Print Advertising Using Scanpath Theory (Tech. Rep.). University Library
Groningen, SOM Research School. (# 97B32)
• Townsend & Kahn (2008). The “Visual Preference Heuristic”: The Influence of Visual versus Verbal Depiction on Assortment Processing, Perceived
Variety, and Choice Overload. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(5), 993-1015.
• Wedel & Pieters (2000). Eye Fixations on Advertisements and Memory for Brands: A Model and Findings. Marketing Science, 19(4), 297–312.
• Wedel, M. & Pieters, R. (2008), “A Review of Eye-Tracking Research in Marketing”, in “Review of marketing research”, pp. 123–146.
• Weinreich, Obendorf, Herder & Mayer (2008). Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use. ACM Transactions on the Web, 2(1).
Graphics: https://thenounproject.com