With this innovative eye tracking technology, we can focus more on people’s real behaviour on their own devices, while they take part in market research studies at home. As the walled gardens of social media platforms increase their dominance of advertising spend, there’s a growing need to understand the attention-grabbing impact of ads on these platforms. The updated, eye-tracking technology combines accurate smartphone and desktop eye-tracking using the participants own hardware with a way of exposing people to ads and content in a controlled, but hyper realistic environment. For the past 25 years, eye square have been developing realistic test environments for ad testing shopper research and UX studies that optimally reflect natural usage directly on the persons own device and can now more easily combine this with accurate eye-tracking data at scale.

There are a variety of scenarios in which smartphone and webcam eye-tracking can be used. We and our market research customers deal with some of these examples on a daily basis in our studies. For example, in the area of ad impact, we can test the perception of ads and creator content in a natural social media context. In addition, the ever-growing e-commerce field is also becoming more and more important for market research, which is why measuring attention to different retail media and product pages when shopping online is highly relevant. Another example can be the classic UX testing process on websites and apps.

The participants only need their normal smartphone or a laptop and an Internet connection. All current smartphone models offer very good selfie cameras; almost all laptops come with webcams which people are familiar with using for video calls. To participate, research participants don’t need to download anything or install any apps. The simple on-screen instructions guide them, step-by-step through the entire process. The InContext software presents the ads and content and records the data. Participants can be anywhere in the world to take part, but we ask that they are somewhere with a stable internet connection and adequate lighting.

Almost all devices running on Android and iOS are suitable for smartphone eye-tracking and any PC with a webcam should work.  We generally see a very high willingness to participate as participants do not need to download and install anything and are now very familiar with turning their camera on for a video call. An essential pre cursor to high participation rates is complete transparency from the beginning: Answers to questions such as "What will be recorded?" and "How long will the study take?" are important here.

We nearly always recommend a monadic design when using an eye-tracking methodology as this avoids participants playing spot the difference and looking at the stimuli unnaturally, trying to find differences between the designs they have seen.

We normally recommend at least 100 per tested stimuli (ad, pack image, creator post, etc.) for the eye-tracking exercise.

Generally, we try to ensure a biotic environment and show the stimuli in as realistic setting as possible, with a natural surfing experience on a platform. This means that ideally, we want to give participants as many degrees of freedom as possible. For example, if it's a magazine ad we’re testing, participants can flick through the pages as they wish. For Social Media tests we try to ensure a normal surfing session duration.  It is possible to easily alter the duration based on the complexity of the stimuli and normal viewing duration.

Yes, all click data, timestamps, ad visibility and playback data can be recorded and saved by the InContext software.

The participant needs to take part using Chrome, Safari or Firefox browsers.

No. The participant must simply have a working selfie camera or webcam and allow access to their camera for the duration of the eye-tracking task.

Acceptance rates vary a lot by country and panel and what has been explained to the person in the invitation to take part in the research. Acceptance rates have increased recently as many more people are taking part in video calls with colleagues, friends, and family.

The eye-tracking requires that the participant is in a well-lit room where their face and eyes can be seen by the camera. If there are multiple faces in the camera view, the eye-tracking software will not work effectively.

Yes.

No. The eye square software requires that the eye-tracking task is wrapped up in a survey sent to participants. The survey does not need be extensive or ask many questions, but a survey is always required.

The software works with any survey software that can pass a participant out to an external URL and receive them back again. Most survey software can do this. If required, eye square can assist you with scripting and setting up a survey using our own survey software which includes this link to the webcam eye-tracking task.