Poster

An Exploratory Study Examining Intra-site Advertising and Its Effect on the Online User Experience

Laura Bright

Websites have become a standard advertising device used by companies to promote their goods and services as well as provide information to both current and potential customers (Macias 2003). However, to date, little attention has been paid to how websites can improve information flow within themselves using advertising persuasion as a tool. The type of website design element that was the focus of this study is "intra-site advertising", or an advertising tool that promotes a company's own information and product offerings within their website (Lash 2002).

A survey design using a website evaluation scenario was developed for this exploratory research. A total of 300 undergraduate students participated in this survey research. For those study participants who indicated viewing the intra-site advertising (41.4% / n=109) during the website navigation procedure, the majority found it to be worthwhile in terms of helping find website information in a non-intrusive manner. Online self-efficacy, perceived intra-site ad relevance and congruence, and intra-site ad attitude were found to be successful predictors of overall website attitude; however, these same predictors did not influence the perceived flow experienced when navigating the website. Building on these results, future research in this area should investigate the effects of interactivity, location, and congruency of intra-site advertising on online consumer behavior.