Usbility guru, Jakob Neilsen along with Kara Pernice has launched his book, Eyetracking Web Usability that has findings from eyetracking studies that they conducted by bouncing infrared beams off a person’s retinas and recording head movements with a camera.

Interesting findings related to Internet Advertising

• Participants in the study looked at 52% of ads that contained only text,
• 52% of ads that had images and text separately and
• 51% of sponsored links on search-engine pages.
• Ads that imposed text on top of images got less attention
• People in the study saw 36% of the ads on the pages they visited!

Eyetracking Study Heat Map

Findings related to Images on webpages

• Users are more likely to grant a fixation to an image if they can tell from a peripheral look that they will be able to decipher it.
• Iconic images do not get looked at if they are diffi cult to make sense of quickly.
• People are more likely to look at images of an object set against a very simple background than against a crowded one
• When users select a link to a photo section, they usually expect some value-add in that area, such as larger photos or ways to zoom in.
• People also look slightly more at images of a single object— 26 percent—than at images with multiple objects—20 percent.
• People look at unrelated or somewhat related images just 14 percent of the time

Download few pages of the book(pdf) (via)

Tags: usability