Findings From The World’s Largest Digital Eye

Tracking Panel

Since January 2016, in partnership with Nectar Loyalty Ltd., we’ve been running the world’s largest eye tracking panel. We’ve recruited 500 households up and down the country, and equipped each of them with a laptop-mounted eye tracking camera.

This allows us to test digital advertising in a real world environment, tracking where people actually look when browsing the internet, rather than what they say they see.

In this week’s panel test, as it’s valentines day, we decided to test whether valentines ads would receive more attention than non-valentines ad, or whether people would pay attention the ads at all!

Panelists were sent to a valentines article on themirror.co.uk, where they were served a number of pre-selected ads that were either very much to do with Valentines or ones that were definitely not romantic.

Above you can see an example of the two ads we tested. One was for the online gift shop NotOnTheHighStreet.com (NOTHS), who were advertising valentines gifts, and the other for the kitchen roll brand Bounty, definitely not a good Valentines gift!

Results reveal the NOTHS ad was viewed for over two seconds on average compared to the Bounty ad, which was only viewed for an average of 1.2″

This shows the Valentines ad successfully beats the expected dwell time for a DMPU ad of 1.5″

These results suggest that ads relating to key shopping events of the year perform better than just general product ads. This finding is backed up by previous studies we have conducted on Black Friday and Christmas advertising, where total viewing time of both digital and print ads significantly increased around these times of the year.

9% more people actually viewed the NOTHS ad. Although both ads had high levels of viewability on the web page, when it came to who was actually being viewed NOTHS takes the win with 62% of the sample actually viewing the ad in comparison to 53% viewing the Bounty ad.

The engagement curve shows how many people viewed each ad for a certain amount of time.

NOTHS ad still had 22% of people viewing at 2″ compared to only10% of people still viewing the Bounty ad at 2″.