Abstract:

It has been found that the ad location will affect the effectiveness of advertising, but the existing researches did not dig into how individual’s cognitive style influencing his ads reading habit. In this paper, field-dependence and field-independence are introduced in advertising research, which stands for cognitive styles in terms of psychology. Using eye tracking technology, it records eye movement of 37 college students with normal vision when they browse different locations of ads on the web. The results indicate that: for all the subjects, there is significant difference on fixation duration and fixation counts in advertisements of different location. And interaction effect is found between ad location and cognitive style. With different fixation duration and counts, it also affects recognition results. Other than theoretical contribution, this study can also enlighten web advertisers in making advertising strategy.

Key words: cognitive style, eye movement, web advertisement, location