A Study of the Effects of Online Advertising: A Focus on Pop-Up and In-Line Ads

Web advertising has taken many forms, including those that appear within the Web page as an inline graphic, as well as those that "pop up" (over) or "pop under" a browsing window. Grounded in the concepts of perceived intrusiveness and the dual-process theory of cognition and perception, research provides theory-based expectations about how users come to view these ads as irritating and intrusive and thus avoid them. There have been few studies of the affective, cognitive, and behavioral impacts of such advertisements. This study also examines factors that can explain the hypothesized outcomes, in a 2x2x2 fully-factorial design. Besides a control group without ads, factors included ad placement (pop-up versus inline) and ad congruence (with the site's content or not). 417 volunteer undergraduate business students from two countries (Mexico and the United States) performed several search tasks under conditions chosen for them at random. Results indicated that, as expected, intention to return was higher without ads than with ads; retention of website information was higher when ads were not congruent (rather than congruent) with website content, and for sites with inline (rather than pop-up) ads; retention of ad content was higher for non-congruent (rather than congruent) ads, and for inline (rather than pop-up) ads. In contrast, intentions to return were not affected by ad placement, retention of site content was not affected by the existence of ads, retention of animated ads did not surpass that of static ads, and intrusiveness of ads was not affected by the ad congruence, as had been expected. This study provides an initial step into examining several important factors that should be considered by advertisers and designers of sites hosting those ads.