Virtual Host has a post up about eye tracking studies and web design that has some interesting conclusions from a marketing perspective.

The findings range from the obvious (shorter paragraphs perform better than longer ones) to the completely counter intuitive. In the counter intuitive pile is that people look at text before they look at images. In fact, quite a lot of the article is about viewers ignoring images and anything that looks like an ad. This comment particularly struck me:

"In fact, studies showed that users had difficulty finding information in large colored letters [with fancy formatting and fonts] because visual clues told them to ignore it."

So what's a marketer to do? The authors mention that ads placed next to the best content are seen more often (which is not surprising) and that text ads are viewed more intently than other types of ads:

"[Text ads] aren’t distracting and blend in with the rest of the content on the page, making them less visually irritating to the reader and ultimately more successful."

It's certainly an idea worth testing, though I'm not totally convinced.

The whole post can be found here.