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Do Your Customers Like What They See?
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Do Your Customers Like What They See?
Ben Steadman
In an earlier article about using eye tracking in CRO, we introduced the value of the technique as part of the conversion optimiser’s arsenal of research methods. Now, let’s take an example of the kind of insight it provides that can inform your website design choices, namely “time to first fixation”.
I’ll also describe how you can use it to test the possible impact of changes before you roll them out to your live audience.
The power of eye tracking is partly its ability to show us where visitors’ eyes move to on a webpage and in which order they see the various elements. So, how do the data and associated observations translate into webpage design?
Well, they can show us how many seconds it takes a visitor to see a particular section on your webpage and what they looked at before they got there, i.e., time to first fixation.
What does that tell us? It means we can identify the parts of your design that may be helping and/or hindering the visitor while they try to get to a critical part of the webpage in their conversion journey.
Here are two similar product pages—the objective of both is to get a visitor to add the product to their bags.
We performed eye tracking tests on both pages with a group of women aged between 35 and 45 years. Here are the results—the red indicates prolonged eye fixations.
With eye tracking, we can take heat mapping further. For instance, we can see how long it takes participants to notice the CTA.
If we look at the average time to first fixation on the CTA, we see the following.
Do you think three seconds isn’t very much? Then consider your own website and add up all those three seconds on different webpages. What would the combined impact be on your customer journey if your webpage design does not help them find what they’re looking for (or what you want them to see)?
Each extra second soon adds up as a distraction to drag your visitors from the position of potential customers to website abandoners.
This doesn’t mean that all extra images are bad and distracting and will hurt conversion – it is all about context. For example, is the visitor ready to move to the CTA? Have we given them all the information they need? Have we persuaded them enough to believe our product or service is right for them? Can we drive impulse and upsell purchases?
What we do know is that by making it easy for your customers, and their experience more enjoyable, they’re more likely to continue shopping.
By understanding the time to fixation within your page design, you can use the data to inform your testing to make the customer experience better.
How do we ultimately know that these changes are having the right impact? By continuous testing to see if you’re achieving your goals of increasing transactions and revenue.
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