Have you ever wished
there was some way to calibrate or measure the effectiveness
of your Web site based on what visitors actually see and
experience?
Here are a few
important questions to consider:
-
How
much of your important Web copy do you think is really
being read by Visitors?
-
What
elements are your Web visitors really looking at on your
Web page?
-
Where
does their eyes first begin on a page and where do their
eyes hesitate or stop?
-
What
do your Web visitors see on your page but do NOT click on?
Would it be interesting to measure if you could?
-
What
do visitors NOT click on, simply because they never see
it?
All
interesting questions that you may wish you had an answer for.
Well, now you can have an answer to these observations and
many others too.
Think
about these ideas.
-
Would
it be useful to really be able to graphically measure how
effectively you write articles?
-
Would
it be useful to be able to look at your work and analyze
exactly what people are looking at?
-
At
what point do people stop scrolling down to read a page?
Thanks
to a heat mapping process it is actually possible to measure
all of these things and more. One very well test subject is
examining how people read the news. How their eyes move over
the headlines, where their gaze stops, which links they see,
which links they don't see, which links they choose to click
on and much more can all be captured using test subjects.
Here
is an excellent article written by Eyetrack Project Managers
Steve Outing and Laura Ruel as they observed 46 people for one
hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real
multimedia content.
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
In
this article they offer some excellent observations and tips
based upon their research.
Here
is an example of a color legend to help explain the
meaning of a heat map.
Here
is a recorded video of actual eye tracking sessions.
Fascinating to watch!
Are you
interested in having your Web page analyzed using a specific
demographic test group. One company that offers these services
is called Eyetools.com. They
provide tools and services to measure eye-movement, as your
test group looks at your Web pages to examine what people see,
what they read, what they don't read, what they glance
at, what they skip over, and what they never see.
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About John Alexander
John Alexander is Co-director of Training at Search
Engine Workshops offering live, SEO Workshops with partner
Robin Nobles as well as online SEO
training. John is author of an
e-book called Wordtracker
Magic and co-author of
the Totally Non-Technical
Guide for A Successful Web Site.
John is also an official member of the customer support team
at Wordtracker.com.
