An Eye-Movement Study Of Web-Ads Of Tourism Banners On Consumers’ Visual Attention

With the large increase in Internet penetration and the sustained growth of Internet users in those years, Internet has become an indispensable and important part in people’s daily life. Thus, many industries treat Internet as a piece of fertile land and spend large sums of money on Internet advertising, hoping to open and extend the sales of goods or services, win the attention of consumers, and eventually achieve the profit of enterprises. So do those tourism enterprises. How can web-ads of tourism banners attract the consumers to pay more attention? This has been an important problem for both tourist destinations and tourism enterprises. Through eye movement experiment, this paper examines the influence of task-oriented, relevance between web content and advertising content, different gender and different ways of advertising appeal of web-ads of tourism banners on consumers’visual attention.This paper has used two experiments:experiment 1 adopts a two-factor within subjects repeated experiment of 2 (task-oriented:with task, without task) x 3 (content relevance: highly-related, lowly-related, unrelated), to examine the influence of task-oriented and content relevance of web-ads of tourism banners on consumers’visual attention. The results are as follows:(1) the main effect of task-oriented is significant. The fixation times and fixation duration of the without-task group is much more than the with-task group’s; (2) the main effect of content relevance between the Web pages and the tourism banners is not significant; (3) the main effect of interaction between task-oriented and content relevance is not significant.Experiment 2 discusses the influence of different gender and different advertising appeal (emotional appeal ads, rational appeal ads) on consumers’visual attention. The results show that:(1) the difference of pupil size of male and female participants in browsing web-ads of tourism banners is significant. The pupil size of female has more expansion than that of male; (2) compared with emotional appeal ads, participants have more fixation times and fixation duration on web-ads of tourism banners with rational appeal; (3) the main effect of interaction between gender and advertising appeal is not significant.