Psychology of the Eye

Affiliate marketers and website designers can take advantage of a couple of habits that people have when viewing websites.

These habits can be turned into web design techniques that "capture" people's eyeballs and direct them to something you want them to see.

Contrast Focus

I'm sure there is a scientific name for this, but I call it "Contrast Focus" because it uses contrast to focus a visitor's attention into a specific place.

Imagine you visit a webpage where there are no colors and no images, just black text against a gray background. Studies show that when people view such a webpage, their eyes focus almost always to the upper-left corner of the page.

But if there was a colorful image, maybe sized at 200x200 pixels, positioned at the far right of the page, most of those people will instead focus on the image.

This is because there is a dramatic contrast between the mostly black and gray webpage, and the colorful image. People have a habit of focusing their eyes on the most visually appealing object. In absence of anything visually appealing, they default to focusing on the upper-left.

Conversely, if your webpage is filled with colors, interesting images, and even some animated images, people tend to lose focus. Their eyes wander all over the webpage, and never really focus on anything.

The optimum use of "Contrast Focus" is where the page has a light-gray background, with black text, a very common font such as Verdana or Times New Roman, and a single image positioned to the far-left, within the top fold.

You actually don't want the image to be at the very top of the page. Instead, position it even with the start of your content.

Left-to-Right Eye Movement

Most people, particularly in the Western World, observe things from left to right. When they visit a webpage for the first time, their eyes typically make a quick scan of the page, starting at the top-left, and scanning to the right and down, finally resting their eyes on the most visually appealing object. This quick scan will take about 3 to 10 seconds at the most.

Using the "Contrast Focus" technique from above, place your most important piece of content immediately to the right of the colorful image. This "important piece of content" will presumably be an affiliate link, newsletter sign up, or some kind of sales copy.

The result of combining the "Contrast Focus" and "Left-to-Right Eye Movement" techniques is that your visitors will rest their eyes on the colorful image, and then immediately move to the right, landing on whatever it is you want them to see.

Make sure that the colorful image you use is not overly intricate with detail. The more detailed the image, the more time they will spend looking at it. All you need is just enough color to grab their eyes into a starting point.


This is a screenshot of one of my affiliate websites. Notice how the teal-colored image grabs your attention, and then notice your eyes moving right to rest on the search form.

This form is actually a sophisticated affiliate link. The combination of the "Contrast Focus" and "Left-to-Right Eye Movement" techniques, combine to give this affiliate link a click-through rate of over 60%.