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Eye-Tracking Technology for Measuring Banner Advertising Efficacy on E-Tourism Websites: A Methodological Proposal

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Handbook of e-Tourism

Abstract

In this chapter, we focus on the case of e-tourism websites (also known as Travel 2.0 tools or T2T, such as travel blogs, profiles on social networks, and online travel communities) and measure the effectiveness of advertising banners on these sites. To do this, we propose a methodological approach known as VIROG, video-based infrared oculography, or infrared eye-tracking technology. This technique is applied here in a practical application to track subjects’ visual attention when exposed to three different e-tourism websites. To date, marketing scholars have paid very little attention to analyzing the moderating effect of customer engagement (CE) or ad type when measuring visual attention and recall for a certain banner.

To achieve objectives of the practical application, a within-subject and between-group experimental design was applied on a sample of participants, using their eye-tracking data in addition to a self-administered questionnaire. Based on variables of visual attention and cognitive processing, results of this study reveal the following:

  1. (i)

    no banner blindness was identified for any of e-tourism websites under analysis, and the greatest advertising efficacy of all sites tested was achieved by Facebook;

  2. (ii)

    post hoc measurements of recall were explained by other gaze metrics related to advertising effectiveness (such as number of fixation or duration of the visit); and

  3. (iii)

    the level of CE and the degree of animation of the particular banner exerted a moderating effect on the relationship between attention and recall or memory.

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Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under research project grant ECO2012-39576 and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, National R&D&I Plan, and FEDER Plan under research project grant B-SEJ-209-UGR18. We would like to express our sincere thanks to Janet Hernández-Méndez (University of La Laguna—ULL) for her collaboration in the fieldwork of the practical application.

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Correspondence to Francisco Muñoz-Leiva .

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Appendices

Appendix A: Areas of the Travel 2.0 e-Tourism Web Pages

Fig. 10
figure 10

(a) Areas of the hotel blog (b) Areas of the hotel’s Facebook page (c) Areas of the hotel’s TripAdvisor profile

Appendix B

Table 3 Linear regression. Coefficients (outcome, VD; predictor, FC)
Table 4 Linear regression. Coefficients and statistics. Dependent variable, recall of banner

Index

  • AIDA. It is an acronym that stands for attention or awareness, interest, desire, and action. This model is widely used in marketing and advertising to describe stages that occur from the time when a consumer first becomes aware of a brand or product to when the consumer makes a purchase decision or finally trials a product.

  • Blindness. It is a fact that users ignore and/or do not recall banner content.

  • Bottom-up factors. It is characteristics of the stimulus itself. Bottom-up attentional processing is a rapid form of capture of attention that relies on physical characteristics of the stimulus such as its color, size, or shape of elements in which it is included.

  • Click-through rate or CTR. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign. It is calculated as the number of users who click on a link divided by the number of total users who view a page or advertisement.

  • Cross-cultural perspective. It is a perspective or approach adopted in anthropology and sister sciences (such as sociology, political science, psychology, or economics) that uses field data from some societies to examine the scope of human behavior and test hypotheses about human behavior and individual’s culture.

  • Customer engagement. It is the customers’ behavioral manifestation toward a brand or company, beyond the purchase, resulting from motivational drivers.

  • Eye tracking. It is a technique that records the user’s eye movements while viewing a given scene or image.

  • Fixations. These are periods of time during which a person’s gaze remains stationary.

  • Lux. It is an International System of Units (SI) derived of illuminance and luminous emittance, measuring luminous flux per unit area.

  • Saccades. These are rapid eye movements lasting, in which specific locations in a scene are projected onto the eye.

  • Scanpath. It is a sequence of fixations and saccades that occur in relation to a given stimulus, such as an advert or product packaging.

  • Top-down factors. These are previous ideas about the product that consumers already have. Top-down attentional processing requires consumer to voluntarily search and pay attention to specific information or characteristics.

  • VIROG. Video-based infrared oculography is a method based on infrared corneal reflection. This technology measures the distance and the angle of the reflection of the light source in the center of the pupil.

  • Visual attention. In cognitive psychology, visual attention is thought to operate as a two-step process. In the first step, attention is distributed uniformly over the external (visual) scene, and processing of information is performed in parallel. In the second step, attention is concentrated to or focused on a specific area of the scene, and processing is performed in a serial fashion.

  • Web 2.0. It is also known as “participative Web” or “social Web,” which refers to websites that emphasizes user-generated content, participatory culture, and ease of use for end users. Interoperability, i.e., compatible with other products, systems, and devices, is another characteristic of the Web 3.0.

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Muñoz-Leiva, F. (2022). Eye-Tracking Technology for Measuring Banner Advertising Efficacy on E-Tourism Websites: A Methodological Proposal. In: Xiang, Z., Fuchs, M., Gretzel, U., Höpken, W. (eds) Handbook of e-Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48652-5_121

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