Display advertising normally charges advertisers for every single ad impression. Specifically, if an ad in a webpage has been loaded in the browser, an ad impression is counted. However, due to the position and size of the ad slot, lots of ads are actually not viewed but still measured as impressions and charged. These fraud ad impressions indeed undermine the efficacy of display advertising. A perfect ad impression viewability measurement should match what the user has really viewed with a short memory. In this paper, we conduct extensive investigations on display ad impression viewability measurements on dimensions of ad creative displayed pixel percentage and exposure time to find which measurement provides the most accurate ad impression counting. The empirical results show that the most accurate measurement counts one ad impression if more than 75 of the ad creative pixels have been exposed for at least 2 continuous seconds.
Abstract Click-through rates are still the de facto measure of Internet advertising effectiveness. Unfortunately, click-through rates have plummeted. This decline prompts two critical questions: (1) Why do banner ads seem to be ineffective and (2) what can advertisers do to improve their effectiveness? To address these questions, we utilized an eye-tracking device to investigate online surfers’ attention to online advertising. Then we conducted a large-scale survey of Internet users’ recall, recognition, and awareness of banner advertising. Our research suggests that the reason why click-through rates are low is that surfers actually avoid looking at banner ads during their online activities. This implies that the larger part of a surfer's processing of banners will probably 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 shows that banner ads do have an impact on traditional memory-based measure of effectiveness. Thus, we claim that advertisers should rely more on traditional brand equity measures such as brand awareness and advertising recall. Using such measures, we show that repetition affects unaided advertising recall, brand recognition, and brand awareness and that a banner's message influences both aided advertising recall and brand recognition. An understanding of how people allocate their visual attention when viewing Web pages is very important for Web authors, interface designers, advertisers and others. Such knowledge opens the door to a variety of innovations, ranging from improved Web page design to the creation of compact, yet recognizable, visual representations of long pages. We present an eye-tracking study in which 20 users viewed 361 Web pages while engaged in information foraging and page recognition tasks. From this data, we describe general location-based characteristics of visual attention for Web pages dependent on different tasks and demographics, and generate a model for predicting the visual attention that individual page elements may receive. Finally, we introduce the concept of fixation impact, a new method for mapping gaze data to visual scenes that is motivated by findings in vision research. A common medium for advertising on the Internet is the use of banner ads. This study investigates recall and recognition of animated banner advertisements in an attempt to identify design guidelines. It was hypothesized that animation would increase recall and recognition of novel ads by increasing user awareness. No significant relationships were found between the use of animation and ability to recall and recognize banner ads. Results indicate that animation does not enhance user memory of online banner advertisements.