Keyword advertising is not what you think: Clicking and eye movement behaviors on keyword advertising

This study examined the behavior of online searchers in relation to keyword advertising according to the theory of advertising avoidance. A total of 451 volunteers were recruited for an experiment. A computer program and an eye-tracking device were used to measure the number of clicks and eye movements. The findings show that the number of clicks for to obtain organic search results is higher than that for keyword advertising. There is no difference in observation count between the area of keyword advertising placed above the organic search results and the area of the organic search results themselves. However, observation counts for the organic search results and keyword advertising placed above the organic search results are higher than for the keyword advertising placed at the right-hand side of the page. Searchers seem to spend the longest observation time on the organic search results, then on the keyword advertising placed above the organic search results, and finally on the keyword advertising placed at the right-hand side of the page. With the rapidly evolving Internet technologies, people rely on the Internet to search for and find information. About 70% of Inter-net users use a search engine each day (Jansen 2010). Along with the growing use of search engines, keyword advertising has become popular among advertisers and is now one of the fast growing types of online marketing (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization 2009). Keyword advertising is a premium service offered by such search engines as Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The service assists advertisers in choosing specific keywords to include in their advertising text. When online searchers use these keywords to search for information, related advertising appears on the search engine results pages (SERPs). This type of advertising, which is also called sponsored advertising, paid results (Gauzente and Roy 2012), sponsored links (Naldi et al. 2010) or paid placement (Chen and He 2011), usually appears at the top, bottom, or in the column to the right of the organic search results area. Because keyword advertising can satisfy a searcher's information needs, it often generates higher advertising effectiveness (Yoo 2009, Kim et al. 2012) than do non-targeted banners. Although many studies have discussed what type of advertising creates better advertising effectiveness, some researchers have proposed that people avoid looking at advertising. Especially in the online world, the Internet provides users with environments such as social networking sites, online games, news, and search engines that users …