Discovering The Components In Advertisements That Draw The Most Engagement From Viewers

Overview

Our research question asked which visual elements in advertisements attract the most attention from viewers briefly passing by, and we hypothesized that faces and centrally placed products would receive the closest visual attention due to humans’ natural sensitivity to facial features and the tendency to prioritize centrally located objects. To test this, we employed an eye-tracking platform that displayed a curated set of advertisements to participants while recording their gaze patterns. Participants accessed a link, viewed the ads in a timed session, and their eye-movement data was captured for analysis, allowing us to quantify how often and how long viewers fixated on specific ad elements. Our findings demonstrated that element placement has a significant impact on attention: elements positioned outside the corners of advertisements received approximately 5.46 times more viewership than cornered elements, highlighting the importance of central and prominent positioning. Attention also varied by ad type, with food products attracting the most focus in food advertisements, backgrounds and products dominating product ads, and text drawing the highest attention in service ads. These results support our hypothesis that centrally placed and informative elements are more likely to engage viewers, aligning with theories of top-down visual attention in which individuals prioritize meaningful, information-dense regions over less relevant areas. Overall, our study provides practical guidance for advertisers: key elements such as products, faces, and critical information should be placed near the center of advertisements, while supporting content should be strategically distributed to sustain attention, maximizing the likelihood that messages capture viewer interest.

Competition history

• CSEF 2026 Behavioral & Social Sciences (Junior Division) · Entry J-03-03

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