GazeHawk, a Mountain View, CA analytics company, today unveiled an eye-tracking product for mobile devices, including tablets. The company made Ad Age‘s 10 Startups to Watch list this week for its low-cost eye-tracking software that uses desktop computers’ onboard webcams to collect data.
Eye-tracking on standard computers could help websites and advertisers complement what they already know about page views and click-through rates with a real picture of readers’ attention as they look around at ads, headlines, game elements, photos, links and the like. Analyzing that kind of information, which can’t be gleaned from simply looking at clicks or impressions, could fuel improvements to a site or help justify an advertiser’s spending.
But the new capabilities mean publishers and developers can now watch where app users look as well, with the same goals in mind.
That might appeal to big magazine publishers like Conde Nast, Time and Hearst, which have been hard at work creating tablet versions of their popular magazines, developing the necessary new models for subscriptions, design, content and of course, advertising.
At Ad Age‘s inaugural Media Evolved Conference last November, Time and Universal McCann presented the results of a joint study comparing neurometric feedback (read: brainwaves) from people consuming content on tablet devices to feedback from people reading traditional media. GazeHawk’s new technology might provide a more efficient route to similar insights.
Conde Nast, for its part, has promised to start giving advertisers new metrics on iPad edition consumption – measures such as the number of times an ad in a digital edition was displayed and the average time that digital readers lingered on a page with a specific ad. Eye-tracking could reveal exactly which parts of which ads catch the reader’s eye, and for how long.
GazeHawk has its own testers, but publishers, developers and agencies can also recruit their own panels. Millward Brown and IPG Labs have already worked with GazeHawk, as have Mozilla and Bell Canada’s Sympatico.ca.
The software is also 100% opt-in; it needs to be calibrated with each user’s eye movements, so no video or recording can take place accidentally or without consent.
To read the original article in Advertising Age, click here.
