An Eye-Tracking Approach to Evaluating General Perception of Social Media Advertising Personalization

This study aims to examine the relationship between perceived personalization of Facebook advertising in general and both attentional (i.e., total time spent viewing ads) and behavioral (i.e., ad click counts) responses, as well as to assess whether privacy concern influences this relationship. A lab experiment using eye-tracking equipment and a follow-up survey were conducted, in which participants navigated their own Facebook pages to enhance external validity. During this process, ad attention and clicks were recorded by the eye-tracking machine, followed by the completion of online questionnaires. The results indicated that the perception of how well Facebook advertising generally aligns with participants‘ needs or preferences was not associated with either ad attention or ad clicks. The positive relationship between ad attention and clicks was significant only for participants with low or moderate privacy concern. These findings suggest that effective personalization might be related to individual ads rather than relying on general media-level personalization to obtain satisfactory consumer responses. Furthermore, managing consumers’ privacy concern is critical for ensuring the success of personalized advertising strategies in the future.