LONDON: Procter & Gamble (P&G), the consumer goods giant, plans to make savings in its digital marketing investments by employing eye-tracking technology to analyse exposure to its display ads.

The company's Nordic division has been trialling this approach with Sticky, a media technology business that runs a panel of 14m paid participants worldwide, using webcams to record their eye movements from digital page to digital page, the Drum reports.

"Applying Sticky's tracking to our digital media campaigns will help us to optimise and increase our ROI on digital marketing investments in some campaigns up to 25%," Krister Karjalainen, head of digital at P&G Nordic, said in a statement.

With as many as one third of all viewable impressions never being seen by anyone, there is wide scope for reducing unnecessary ad spend.

Jeff Bander, Sticky president, told Adweek that they would look at its most-used sites to see how premium ad units with high CPMs were performing. "It will inform creative and what sites are best," he added.

Bander also said he was talking to P&G about extending the relationship beyond Europe.

The adoption of eye-tracking is a response to the problem of display ad metrics. Writing in Digiday, Gabe Rogol of Demandbase, a B2B personalisation platform, noted that "99% of people will never click on a display ad" yet many marketers continued to judge display advertising effectiveness by click-through rates.

"Display advertising works," he said. "We just need to set up the tools to properly measure its impact."

He argued for better targeting techniques and web analytics to measure traffic and conversions that came from users seeing display campaigns, "even if those users never clicked on an ad".

The search for greater efficiency and cost savings at P&G comes on top of its recent announcement that it was extending its payment terms for suppliers from 45 to 75 days, a move which has alarmed agencies.

Data sourced from The Drum, Adweek, Digiday, Financial Times; additional content by Warc staff