How readers interact with Digital Marketing Ads – An eye tracking study

Google shows millions of ads every day on search engine and websites. Brands pay tons of money for advertising their creatives. But aren’t we searching for an advertising statistics that clears up which ads catch the visitors’ attention the most? Which ad formats are most seen by visitors? How are readers interacting with digital advertising formats across desktop and mobile?

To find out this, a media company, Fairfax Media came up with a unique eye tracking study with 100 regular website visitors, who visit content sites on a regular basis. In this study, 50 visitors were shown the desktop view of Sydney Morning Herald and other 50 were shown the mobile view of the same.

The researchers presented a range of different advertisements on the website pages and tracked eye movement/gaze of the participants. Participants were also involved in ad-recall exercise and a qualitative discussion about their experiences.

The top-line digital advertising case study findings included:

1. Ads most watched and recalled by the participants were the Ads with simple layout, clear message and strong brand identity.

2. Relevant content with strong visuals to maximise attention, performed the best.

3. Ads at top of page received much attention, making ads placement more important than ad size on mobile or desktop.

4. Larger ad formats and persistent adhesion banner ads on mobile are three times more likely to get attention.

5. Brand discover articles can deliver 20X greater cut-through than standard ad with visitors spending up to 1.5 minutes on some of the highest performing content, or an average of 50 seconds.

6. On desktop, the combination of gutters and top MREC ads gained the highest visual penetration of 65%, followed by top MREC ads 30% and middle leaderboards 30%.

As per Fairfax Media commercial director, Tom Armstrong – “This Eye Tracking Study provides definitive insights on our audience’s behaviour across our digital news mastheads and allows us to continue to evolve our ad solutions to deliver engaged audiences for our clients,”

So, the next time you plan to invest in digital marketing ads, make sure to have a look at these advertising statistics for better viewer engagements. Do share any exciting ad campaign case study that you come across; we would love to hear from you!