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Posted by
Greg Edwards
on
February 10 2005
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Blog Analysis and Optimization With Eyetracking -- Or "Oh, Oh, That Blog's Writing Needs Fixing"
A historical note regarding this post
A special note about this blog entry and the first comment on it from 'Micro Persuasion' (Steve Rubel): his comment, made back in February 2005, and the resulting traffic that came from his site are in many respects responsible for all of the blogging that occurred in 2005 by Eyetools, and by extension, most of the buzz that got generated around eyetracking as a field in 2005. The spike in traffic based on his one comment and his link to our site made us realize that we had something special we could do with our blog. That year we posted as many interesting eye tracking heatmaps as we could think of and wrote about "eyetracking heatmapping." Now in 2009, "heatmapping" as a term seems standard, but back then it didn't exist, and there wasn't much buzz or discussion about eyetracking back then in the marketing world. 2005 was a great year for Eyetools, and Steve Rubel deserves a lot of credit for starting that, and so it is with a special feeling that we express gratitude to Steve Rubel and his blog. If you haven't ever read Micro Persuasion, then we highly recommend it.
— Greg Edwards, founder, and CTO in 2005, now CEO since 2007
This is what happens when you have easy access to eyetracking testing: you start wondering how well you're doing writing about it... and after wondering very briefly, you test it and find that it needs improvement. Alas.
Our first blog: All that red at the top shows that everyone reads our title and the first 1-line paragraph, but that they start dropping off in the middle of the "story" paragraph (guess the writing wasn't as good as I thought :-) .
The "statistics" section held good information, but only 60% of people read it. Can I do better?
And the "punch line" certainly is getting wasted down there (50% and mostly skimming). No big surprise. Shouldn't have been so egotistical to believe that I could actually hold people's attention ALL the way to the end , but that final point was important, so I'm moving it.
So, I'm going to tweak the text of the original blog and post it as a new one. I've still got a bunch of people who will be coming through for this study so I'll test that as well! Crossing fingers... I'm going to go write the new version now...
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Greg Edwards, Chief Technical Officer, for Eyetools, Inc., has launched a fascinating new blog that discusses his work in analyzing how readers interact with blog sites. Here's a heatmap of someone reading one of their blogs... [Read More]
Is it possible that people scrolled the article up, and so the punchline was actually being read in the "red zone," rather than ignored?
Liz, the heatmap takes into account scrolling, so, much to my initial chagrin, they really weren't reading it. I need to hurry up and made some changes and re-post the "improved" version as a new blog (with eye testing to see if it's "better").
Another thing you may want to check out is the demographic differences between customers. In China they read right to left in vertical columns traditionally.