Eye tracking is the procedure of finding where our gaze is located for a reasonable part of time. Many webmasters use eye tracking devices to find the areas of websites where the viewers look the most. Eye tracking is an eye opener for webmasters as they can see how the eyes of their potential customers bounce around the web pages of the site. It is a common yet wrong notion to believe that people read the content on web pages in an orderly manner. Rather, their eyes may move randomly while looking through the “About Us” page which is quite different in pattern when the same person takes a look at the “Order now” page, the “FAQ” section or uses the “Search” facility at the same site.
Watching how the gaze of a visitor moves across the screen, halting at some places and overlooking some other areas, can give some idea about which areas should be the main focus to convert leads into sales and increase the ROI (Return on Investment) thereby.

It is beyond doubt that eye tracking has a tremendous demonstrative value as it helps a webmaster to identify how their users behave. By having the knowledge of how users watch the screen while browsing through your website, you can get a lot of insight into users’ behavior and the areas of your site that you should target to increase the sales and bring more visitors.

To know about where the gaze of a user rests for a long time, eyetracking “heatmaps” are used. These heatmaps show the different areas of a website where the users looked the most. Usually, the areas colored red in the heatmaps denote the most watched areas of the website. Yellow colored areas point toward fewer fixations while blue areas stand for least-viewed part of the site. The areas of the site that haven’t attracted any eyeballs are generally marked in gray color. So, an eyetracking “heatmap” can give valuable information about which areas the viewers are watching the most after landing at your site.

Eye tracking can be used to evaluate various aspects of a website and the online business related therewith as you can have an insight about:

• branding
•  search efficiency
•  navigation usability
• design
• online advertisements, and
• several other components of the site

By using an eye tracking device, you may even analyze how your competitor site is faring as compared to yours. However, despite so many benefits, eye tracking has its own disadvantages. Firstly, eye tracking devices are expensive. In addition to buying the device, you will also need to spend money so that people can be trained to use it properly.  Secondly, an eye tracker may not work for everyone. Often people having long eye lashes or wearing contact lenses cause problem in the proper functioning of these devices. Lastly, results given by eye tracking devices are difficult to analyze as they vary from one site to another and depend a lot on other parameters that need to be taken into account. Nevertheless, the output offered by an eye tracking device can be extremely helpful.

Another problem is that in order to achieve statistical significance you may need to study the gazing behavior of lots of eyeballs to come to a conclusion. Nevertheless the recent days of modern web marketing is witnessing a lot of online businesses studying eye-tracking on their sites to improve their ROI. If done well this can increase the return on investments many times.

Have you ever used eye tracking on your website to study your visitors’ gazing pattern to increase ROI?