The Role of Digital Ad Clutter in Ad Viewership, Memory, and Conversion Outcomes

Abstract

It is unknown if, how, and to what extent digital ad clutter impacts ad effectiveness, leaving managers wondering how to advertise in cluttered digital spaces. In this work, researchers conduct a series of eye-tracking and psychological experiments to learn if and how digital clutter impacts ad viewership and psychological measures of ad effectiveness. Experimental findings establish that digital ad clutter is a meaningful digital advertising moderator. Across two eye-tracking studies, clutter is found to meaningfully alter how consumers distribute their limited attention across advertisements but not meaningfully cause consumers to avoid viewing advertisements altogether. While aggregate ad viewership increases with clutter, suggesting ad attention is a function of the number of ads on the page, premium advertising space suffers from viewership cannibalization, while middle-of-the-page advertisements are heterogeneously affected. Using a large panel dataset detailing the interactions between nearly one million consumers, 85 thousand publishers, and 19 advertisers, we then study how clutter correlates with ad effectiveness in the real world, finding that a one standard deviation increase in clutter associates with as much as an 85% reduction in average conversion probabilities across campaigns. The paper discusses implications for advertisers, publishers, and marketing researchers.

Keywords: Display Advertising, Clutter, Eye-Tracking, Field Data