Effects of ad quality & content-relevance on perceived content stream qualityHenriette Cramer Yahoo Personalization & Platforms Sunnyvale, CA, USA

An illustration:

Ads that individually have been rated as high quality can have negative effects in context.

bad ad1. ad that is annoying to the user (Goldstein & McAfee, 2013)

(+ decreases product engagement)

ad ad

ad

ad

Display advertising: banners, pop-ups

content content

content

ad

contentad

contentcontent

content

content

Native advertising search ads, in-stream ads, sponsored posts

ad

content

content

content

content

How do native ad quality & context-relevance affect content perceptions?

Research shows …

Noticeable ads get more engagement (Goldfarb and Tucker, 2011)

Overly noticeable, annoying ads cost both user & site (Goldstein & Mcafee, 2013)

Relevance increases ad effectiveness (Goldfarb & Tucker 2013, Buscher et al., 2010, Yan et al. ’09)

Personal relevance can lead to more pleasant UX (De Sa et al, 2013)

Too personally relevant is too close for comfort (Agarwal et al., 2013)

Two-step studyMechanical Turk (US)

1.

ads rated as ‘good’ or ‘bad’

2.

Take good/bad un/related ads

Rate stream quality.

Step 1:45 native ads x 10 ratings per ad = 450 ratings 98 participants

Likert-type scales (1-5) + Why? for 1-3.

1. … how annoying would you say that this ad is? 2. … how would you rate the design of this ad? 3. … rate the trustworthiness of this ad? 4. how familiar are you with the brand advertised?

Step 2Ads in context

4 conditions,

Good Ads: 2 ads rated as not annoying & not untrustworthy

• 1. 2 good ads non-related to content

• 2. 2 good ads, 1 content-related: a credit card ad near credit-related headline.

• 3. ’Bad Ads: 2 bad ads rated as annoying & untrustworthy

• 4. No Ads: only articles

237 participantsLikert-type scales (1-7) + Why?

1. How credible do you think this news site is? 2. How would you rate the quality of this collection

of news links?

Limitations

1 ad format 1 type of content-relatedness 1 specific credit-related ad not looking at millions of actual users

… go forth and do a better study!

CC Steve Hersh flic.kr/p/7YqHge

should've, could've, would've

People distinguish between credibility of stories vs. overall site quality

Quality•No ads > both good and bad ads (MW, p<.01) •Good non-related > good content related (MW, p <.01

• High quality ads in context can have negative effects

• Interesting: Having no ads is better than good, but too content-related ads, but not sig different from good, unrelated ads

Step 2Quality Results

sig dig for credibility (H=9.083, df=3, p=.028) & quality (H=14.997, df=3, p=.002)

Mann-Whitney 1-tailed comparisons between conditions, with Holm-Bonferroni adjustment: target p value/significance n-rank of pair +1.

Our (too) content related ad.

Branding goes both ways

“I think it's credible because [companyX] is one of the advertisers and [companyX] is a very reputable company…”-GCR

Ads were mentioned in ‘why’ people perceived the stream as high or low quality

whether they were there or not.

Two positives can be a negative

Extends Goldfarb & Tucker, 2013:

…combining multiple effective ad strategies can decrease their effectiveness when each alone prime user concerns.

Ads that individually have been rated as high quality can have negative effects in context.

Implications for ad-supported services:• Clearly distinguish ads & content • Evaluate ads for quality, then evaluate for

quality within-context • Offer in-context feedback opportunities

Ads affect experiences, research them!

henriettecramer.com @hsmcramer