The impact of banner advertisement placement for Arabic readers and advertising outcomes

Abstract

A main advantage of web advertising over other advertising mediums is its efficiency in driving purchase intentions, enabling consumers to jump from advertisement to purchase in a single click. This paper aims to explore the optimal advertisement placement for Arabic web pages by considering how advertising placement and page context affects advertising outcomes. This study is one of the first to examine the physiological and cognitive processes involved in the understanding of the effectiveness of ad placement in Arabic languages. The theoretical model suggests that advertising outcomes can be affected significantly by hemispheric context (how the two hemispheres of the brain process information on an image or text-oriented page) as well as hemispheric ad placement, pertaining to optimal left-right placement of image/text ads. Demographic and advertisement data was collected from participants during the study upon ensuring ethical approval for this. The data sample involved online testing of 320 Arabic readers who were shown one of eight different web page layouts, with each layout shown to 40 respondents. Results indicate that Arabic readers perform differently to English readers, since the former process text using both brain hemispheres, in comparison to other languages. The implications of this research are that placement and optimal banner advertisement design are highly dependent on the objectives of advertising.