Eye Movement Patterns on Chinese Yellow Pages Advertising

A fundamental question in e-commerce is to understand how consumers process online information, how they allocate their attention, and whether there exist any cultural differences. This research makes a first step in this direction. We examined eye movement data collected while consumers chose businesses from the yellow pages of a Chinese telephone directory on a computer screen. All subjects were from China and read and spoke Mandarin. The findings are based on 15,820 eye fixations, 3,510 unique ad viewings, and 512 choices from 64 participants. Participants noticed 90% of the quarter-page display ads but only 6% of the plain listings. They noticed more colour ads than non-colour ads and viewed quarter-page colour ads 11% longer than equivalent ads without colour. Attention is an important component of subsequent choice behaviour. Consumers spent twice as much time viewing ads for businesses they ended up choosing. Using logistic regression, ad size had the largest influence on choice, followed by graphi...