Comparative analysis of advertising attention to Facebook social network: Evidence from eye-movement data

With the rapid development of social networking sites, Internet advertising has quickly become an important marketing tool. Previous studies either utilized the concept of click-through-rate (CTR) to estimate the number of people who responded to the presence of the advertisements, or employed a questionnaire to measure the advertisements' effectiveness. However, these results couldn't accurately reveal potential customers due to the lack of a common understanding on Internet advertising. This study used eye tracking technology to record the participants' eye gaze behaviors and analyze the differences in the distribution of visual attentions while browsing the researcher's Facebook page. The participants consisted of 65 students whose eye movements were tracked and recorded by the eye tracking system. These participants came from a northern university of science and technology in Taiwan, of which 35 were assigned to Facebook friend group and the other 30 were assigned to non-Facebook friend group according to their interpersonal relationships with the researcher. Eye tracking measurements, including total fixation duration (TFD) and number of fixations (NOF) on the defined regions of interest (ROIs) of the Facebook page were compared to indicate their visual attentions. The experimental results showed that 1) there was a significant difference on the right-hand side (RHS) ads between the two groups based on TFD and NOF; 2) there was a significant difference on the desktop news feed (DNF) ads between the two groups based on TFD and NOF; 3) there was the same viewing sequences between the two groups based on stimulus with RHS ads; and 4) there was a difference of viewing sequences between the two groups based on stimulus with DNF ads.