Eye-Tracking

Guest: Kevin John, PhD, Professor of Communications at BYU  Have you noticed that you don’t see as many ads along the borders of your Facebook feed lately? Maybe you haven’t because, it turns out, people really weren’t paying much attention to those ads in the first place. Which is why Facebook is shifting ads to appear in the stream of news you’re your friends. Those “sponsored” messages that look like a standard post, but are really a paid ad. And for that, you can thank eye-tracking research. Rather than survey people about what they noticed in an ad, media researchers can now just put people in front of a webpage and use infrared cameras to see where their eyes linger, and then adjust accordingly.