Top- of- Page Ads are Best, Eye Tracking Study Finds
Christine Blank
DMNews 07/11/2005A
A new Enquiro
Eye Tracking Study shows that that ads placed at the top of the page are the most viewed ads on a
website. The study was conducted on Internet users while browsing pages on Google and other search engines with similar Top, side, side layouts. The study found that users view top organic ads for 3 seconds and top sponsored ads for 1.55 seconds on the first visit to a website. In addition, viewers view side ads for a much longer 1.02 seconds upon a second visit to the site. Tops ads are still regarded as best, however, with 43% of people looking at top ads and 38.7%
viewing above-the-fold organic ads. Only 1% of viewers looked at side ads.The results of this study are not at all surprisingly. Toolbar navigation has always begun at the upper left corner of any Internet browser. This is where users enter URLs, work on the internet, and save files. Loading a new website normally proceeds from this upper viewing corner so it is natural that users continue to look in that direction when the new window opens up. However, what is new about this study is the finding that most users after viewing the top ads, usually view the side ads as well. Viewing the top ads increases the probability of a user viewing the side ads on the second visit to the site. Thus, advertisers that have missed out on a good top ad opportunity might find it sensible to invest in a side ad on a website that elicits a lot of second visit traffic.What statistical software packages can do in this field of study and analysis is help analyze data results that are collected from the studies. Although SPSS and other packages are not designed to collect the data, they can help understand the occurrence of variance and the importance of this variance. In this study, for instance, SPSS could've helped determine, given a data table, which area of the website is most likely to be scanned upon first and repeat visits.