How Understanding Eye Movement Increases Conversion Rates

Understanding how you can control your audience's eye movement is key to getting them to click your Calls to Action.

Eye Movement is a simple concept to explain. Understanding how the answer can benefit your website is another, but not impossible. First, understand what the base purpose of your website is. That is, do you want someone to buy something? Do you want visitors to download a product? Or do you want someone to fill out your contact form? All of which are actions that one might expect their visitors to make when they come to your site.

With a clear understanding of what your website’s purpose, how can you get more people to do what you want them to do on your site?

How do people really read anyway?

For starters, understand how your audience reads. In America, as well as a number of other countries with various languages, we read from left to right and that’s where I’m focusing today.

When you read a book, you’ll see that your eyes don’t stay on each word you read, your eye will actually jump ahead a bit, always to the right.

Where should you place your Calls-to-Action?

As you can see, people tend to focus on the center and work to the right. Click for larger image.

If we realize that eye movement goes left to right, then down and to the right again we should consider placing our important content accordingly.

• If you have an important call-to-action, like an RSS signup form, or a contact form, place it on the right, perhaps the middle or top portion of your page.
• Unless your site is retail/e-commerce based, then stick with at least a two column layout for your site. From the image above, you can see that visitors of a website spend little time on the left side of the page.
• Make your call-to-action stick out. Use a color that is in stark contrast to the colors used for the layout. That is, if you have a primarily light layout, consider a bright red, or blue with why font. It’s a bit of an eye sore, but sure to capture attention.
• For your content, be sure to use titles that also capture attention. You want people to keep viewing your pages and compelling content will do that and when you combine it with calls t0 action, you can force the viewers eye to do what you want. Compelling titles or copy get noticed. Apply a bolder, larger font to help grab attention when the viewer’s eye is ready to move back to the left.

How does eye movement affect e-commerce sites?

Ecommerce sites are a bit different than a more standard layout. Generally speaking it’s a best practice for a retail site to have three columns, unlike a blog or informational two column layout site.

As we can see here, on this ecommerce site, eye movement tends to spend more time on the left!

This is because consumer’s eye movements behave differently. They still read from left to right, however, they spend much more time on the left than on the right.

Here are a couple tips I would offer:

• Consider using odd numbers of products per row, 3 or 5 preferably.
• Try placing your most popular item in the middle. Typically, this is something that Amazon plays around with, but you should try testing out such layouts and see what you get.
• Use a three column layout. Try putting deals at the top one third of the page. The reason is that most viewers barely make it half way down a website page anymore. While you don’t want to over do it and make the tops of your web pages an ADHD nightmare of shiny attention grabbing banners and such, you do want to make it a bit top heavy on the top of your page. Just take note of the heat map.

If you can follow these suggestions you’re sure to increase visitor engagement and potential conversion opportunities as well.