Abstract
There has been a growth in e-commerce, presenting consumers with varied forms of advertising. A key goal of web advertising is to leave a lasting impression on the user, and web satisfaction is an important measure of the quality and usability of a web page after an ad is placed on it. This experiment manipulated participants’ purpose in web browsing (free browsing versus goal oriented) and the color combination of the web background and the vertical-ad background (high or low hue contrast) to predict users’ satisfaction with the web page and the degree of ad recall. The psychological mechanisms of this effect were also explored using an eye-tracking device to record and analyze eye movements. The participants were 120 university students, 64.2% of whom were female and 35.8% of whom were male. During free browsing, participants could simulate the daily use of a browser to browse the web and were given 120 s to do so, and in the task-oriented browsing condition, participants were told in advance that they had to summarize the headlines of each news item one at a time within 120 s. The results showed that, in the free-viewing task, the hue contrast between the ad–web background colors negatively affected web satisfaction and ad memory whereas there was no significant difference in this effect in the goal-oriented task. Furthermore, in the free-viewing task, the level of attentional intrusion mediated the effect of ad–web hue contrast on the degree of ad recall; color harmony mediated the effect of hue contrast on the user’s evaluation of web satisfaction. These results can act as a new reference for web design research and marketing practice.
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Data available on request from the authors. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Xia, T., Yan, Y. & Guo, J. Color in web-advertising: the effect of color hue contrast on web satisfaction and advertising memory. Curr Psychol 43, 14645–14658 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05429-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05429-9