Where to Place an Online Ad: An Eye-Tracking Experiment

Abstract

Internet advertising consumes over 100 billion $ globally, therefore it is important to see if those money are well spent. The aim of this article is to investigate if Internet users are looking at advertisements and where they are looking at. An eye-tracking experiment was designed to test how much attention- in terms of fixation time and fixation counts - is allocated to advertisements when users are performing different online tasks. Tasks were selected based on complexity – low/high complexity – and involvement – low/high involvement. The results revealed that the longer it takes to accomplish a task, the more the user will look at advertisements. Regardless of task, users pay the most attention to the top advertising area followed by downright advertising area. Even if the study has some limitations, it has also some valuable managerial recommendations.

Keywords

• online ad
• eye-tracking
• attention
• advertisement
• internet