1、中文 3788 字，1.1万英文字符，2000单词 标题： Internet Advertising: Is Anybody Watching? 原文： Abstract Click-through rates have emerged as the de facto measure of Internet advertisingeffectiveness. Unfortunately, click-through rates are plummeting. This decline prompts fourcritical questions: (1) why do
2、banner ads seem to be ineffective； (2) what can advertisers do toimprove their effectiveness； (3) does an immediate measure such as click-through rate undervalueonline advertising； and, (4) are memory-based measures such as recall or awareness moreappropriate? To address these questions, we utilized
3、 an eye-tracking device to investigate onlinesurfers attention to online advertising. Then we conducted a large-scale survey of Internetusers recall, recognition, and awareness of banner advertising. Our research suggests that the reason why click-through rates are low is that surfers actually avoid
4、 looking at banner ads during their online activities. This suggests that the larger part of a surfers processing of banners will be done at the pre-attentive level. If such is the case,click-through rate is an ineffective measure of banner ad performance. Our research also showsthat banner ads do h
5、ave an impact on traditional memory-based measure of effectiveness. Thus,we claim that advertisers should rely more on traditional brand equity measures such as brandawareness and advertising recall. Finally, our study shows that although repetition leads to lower click-through rates, it has a benef
6、icial impact on brand awareness and advertising recall. Introduction As the Internet matures into a viable commercial medium, many web sites (e.g., Lycos,Go Network, Yahoo!) rely on advertising to finance their operations. The lure of advertising is such that some companies provide users with free I
7、nternet access (e.g., NetZ, FreeI.com)and even free computers (e.g., Free-PC.com) in exchange for their eyeballs (Berst 1999). This should not come as a surprise as advertisers have long used every conceivable vehicle to display their messages in front of the gazing eyes of potential customers, be i
8、t magazines, television, or racecars. As the Internet becomes more mainstream, many companies are budgeting significant dollar amounts for online advertising. The Internet Advertising Bureau (1999) reports 1998 online advertising expenditure of $1.92 billion, more than double 1997 revenues. The bulk
9、 of this expenditure is allocated to banner ads. Banner ads typically consist of rectangular images displayed at the top of web pages and contain the message that the advertiser wants to send to web surfers. The most widely used measure of online advertising effectiveness is the percentage of the to
10、tal number of ad exposures that induce the surfer to actually click on the banner in response to the advertised message. This measure is known as the click-through rate (Novak and Hoffman 1997). Click-through rate has become such a dominant measure that in 1996 Procter and Gamble made a deal with Ya
11、hoo! in which P&G would pay only for click-throughs and not for exposures (Associated Press 1996). The ability of a site to generate click-throughs also affects the advertising rates it can command (Hamilton 1998). Click-through rates started in 1996 at around seven percent. However, they have d
12、eclined steadily to around 0.6% in 1999 (Nielsen/Netratings 1999). This is problematic because advertisers typically do not knowingly allocate budgets to media that are not effective.Does this trend suggest that the online advertising community is going to fritter along with the decline in click-thr
13、ough rates? Should one sell his or her stocks in Yahoo!? Not necessarily.Many authors (Ambler 1998, Batra, Lehmann, Burke, and Pae 1995) argue that good advertising affects long-term brand equity, not necessarily short-term sales. They contend that equity variables such as brand or ad awareness are
14、better gauges of advertising effectiveness. In this spirit, Briggs and Hollis (1997) have shown using Milward Browns Brand Dynamics system(Dyson, Farr, and Hollis, 1996), that banner ads can have an impact on consumers attitudes toward a brand independent of click-through. Briggs and Hollis study, c
15、ombined with the decline in click-through rate, begs the questions (1) why do banner ads seem to be ineffective； (2) what can advertisers do to improve their effectiveness； (3) does an immediate measure such as click-through rate under-value online advertising； and, (4) are more traditional measures
16、 such as recall or awareness more appropriate?The purpose of this paper is to answer these four questions. We intend to show that because banner ads operate mostly at the pre-attentive processing level (Shapiro, MacInnis, and Hoyer1997), traditional effectiveness measures are more appropriate than c
17、lick-through rates. We will then use these measures to study some of the factors that might impact banner ad effectiveness. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. The first section discusses the results of a study which utilized an eye-tracking device to determine whether web surfers se
18、e banner ads and which factors increase or decrease the probability that a banner ad is seen. We use the results from this first study to generate hypotheses about the characteristics of banner ads that might increase or decrease viewers attention. The following section relates the results of the fo
19、llow-up study that tested the hypotheses generated in the first study on a broader sample of web surfers (807 respondents). The study also explored the effects of Internet advertising on recall, recognition, and awareness. We then consider the results of both studies and discuss their managerial rel
20、evance. Finally, we close with concluding remarks, a discussion of the limitations of our methodology and results, and directions for future research. Study 1: Eye-tracking The Internet differs from traditional media in at least one significant way. When an advertiser uses Television or Radio to del
21、iver his messages, he preempts the program being broadcast (e.g., a sitcom or song) and uses all the bandwidth of the medium to transmit his message. This means that by default, the viewer or listener is paying attention to the advertisers,and the message is only interrupted if the listener zaps awa
22、y. Zapping, however, is quite infrequent. Siddarth (1999) reports zapping rates for commercials of less than 3%. By contrast,online banner ads share their bandwidth with other elements of the pages in which they are being displayed. A banner ad typically occupies less than 10% of the area of a web p
23、age on a standard VGA computer screen (640x480 pixels). Therefore, the attention of the web surfer is generally focused on other elements of the page. The task of the banner ad is to first grab a surfers attention and second to induce the surfer to click on the ad. If surfers never look at a banner,
24、 they cannot click on it! Shared bandwidth might explain why click-through rates are low, but not why they are declining. There is some evidence that some online surfers dislike banner ads (Bass 1999). This dislike is widespread enough that various software exist that actually prevent browsers from
25、downloading ads (AdsOff!, Guard, JunkBuster.). One can thus hypothesize that, as surfers gain more familiarity with the medium, they learn to differentiate informational content from advertising. Ultimately, this would give them the ability to disregard banner ads. Given this possible learning and a
26、voidance behavior, we start our investigation by measuring the extent to which surfers pay attention to banner ads. We begin by formulating the following two hypotheses: H1: Internet users avoid looking at banner ads. H2: The more time users have spent on the Internet, the less they pay attention to
27、 banner ads. To test these hypotheses, we asked a group of subjects to look at various web pages while hooked up to an eye-tracking device that records their eye movements and fixations. Eyetracking studies are not new. Javal (1878) used eye-tracking to study reading patterns more than 100 years ago
28、. Although reading studies are still being conducted through eye-tracking (Hyn 1995), a growing number of eye-tracking studies have recently addressed marketing problems.For instance, Russo and Leclerc (1994) studied in-store brand choice, Fischer et al (1989) studied warning labels on tobacco ads,
29、Janiszewski (1998) looked at exploratory search behavior with catalogs, Kroeber-Riel (1979) investigated the effect of arousal on advertising copy processing,and Lohse (1997) studied Yellow Page advertising. Study design Our study was conducted using information portals as a background. The cover st
30、udy was an ergonomic research on the design for one of the largest French portals: Voil(www.voila.fr). The subjects were asked to perform five searches using three portals: Voil, an alternate layout for Voil (henceforth called Voil Bis), and Voils largest competitor. Three of the searches related to
31、 general topics (e.g., find information about Le Louvre), the other two r， elated to individuals (e.g., find the phone number of Jean Dupont). Each of the three generaltopic searches was made using a different portal. The two other searches were made with Voil and Voil Bis. Our first study was very revealing. It provides us with an answer to the first question motivating this study (Why are banner ads not effective?) and a hint of an answer to the second and third questions (What can advertisers do to improve banner
