Palace Resorts is using eye tracking to recommend Latin American vacation destinations.
“Never Lift A Finger” accesses a user’s webcam or smartphone camera as they take an online quiz. The site then gauges interest through eye movements and gaze duration to recommend a Palace Resort vacation package.
Alternatively, users can choose to manually select videos or tilt their phones to make decisions through the mobile site.
Eye tracking offers marketers a way to measure genuine interest based on where a user looks and for how long. This allows them to then customize outreach methods accordingly. For example, a recent eye-tracking study found that video ads embedded in premium content were found to drive purchase intent 27 percent higher than skippable pre-roll ads or video ads found on social feeds.
For this campaign, users are shown a pair of videos that feature different elements of Palace Resorts, such as family-friendly dining or adults-only relaxation. An on-screen beacon shows users where they are looking on the screen. Once they have looked at the same video for a few seconds, the software confirms the selection and moves on to the next pair of parallel videos.
After five videos have been selected, the microsite recommends one of Palace Resorts’ 10 locations, along with more information and a booking portal.
“Never Lift A Finger” was created by Expedia Group Media Solutions, the advertising arm of Expedia. The company has created a number of interactive travel experiences over the years, including a 360-degree ad for San Antonio Texas and a facial recognition campaign for Hawaii called “Discover Your Aloha,” which they released in 2016. The latter used facial recognition to gauge a viewer’s reaction to a video featuring different vacation ideas from swimming to hiking or just relaxing. As with “Never Lift A Finger,” the microsite would then recommend vacation packages based on what the user interacted with the most.
The company’s current eye-tracking campaign is running across Expedia, Hotels.com, Hotwire and Travelocity in the US, Canada, Mexico, Latin America and the UK.
