To Click or Not to Click? Investigating Antecedents of Advertisement Clicking on Facebook

Online social networking has become a new thread that has been woven into the fabric of people's daily lives. Two thirds of the global Internet population regularly visit social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube (Duggan Smith, 2013) In September 2015 Facebook, the world's most popular SNS, was catering for more than 1.4 billion active users and was the world's second most visited website after Google (Alexa, 2015) Given its phenomenal popularity, Facebook has become a premier destination for international marketers, and the global advertising revenue of this SNS reached $15.3 billion in 2014, representing an almost 41% increase over that of 2013 (Beck, 2015).Facebook advertising comprises a number of forms including paid media (i.e. display advertisements) owned media (i.e. brand pages) and earned media (i.e. word of mouth) Facebook's unique social nature has placed much of its advertising emphasis on earned media, whereby brands obtain free exposure by sharing of user generated communication, such as comments or links throughout their social networks (Chu, 2011) Therefore, a significant portion of advertising spending goes toward building and maintaining a social network presence through earned media (Williamson, 2009).According to recent research, however, these kinds of earned media occur far more infrequently than previously supposed, and the consistent transmission of commercial messages across social networks is also a rare occurrence (Bagherjeiran, Bhatt, Parekh, Chaoji, 2010) furthermore, Tucker (2014a) has shown that advertisers may have to sacrifice the commercial effectiveness of their message to achieve the effect of going viral. Therefore, paid media, such as display advertisements, play an essential role in facilitating the sharing of marketers' commercial messages through social networks (Tucker, 2014a) In fact, the display advertisement is a key Facebook building block because this is the advertisement type that generates most of the revenue of the SNS. Display advertisements accounted for 88% and 84% of Facebook's revenue in 2013 and 2012, respectively, with one million active marketers operating on Facebook in global terms by 2014 (Nair, 2014).Marketers have been attempting to tailor display advertisements for Facebook users based on their likes, interests, and comments. In addition, Facebook display advertisements can also pair marketers' messages to users' social actions, including their status updates (Villiard Moreno, 2012) Thus, Facebook display advertisements provide highly relevant content based on the information that Facebook users share on their personal profiles (Lambrecht Tucker, 2013) However, the research on display advertisements and how they are perceived and used by Facebook users is rather limited (Hadija, Barnes, Hair, 2012; Taylor, Lewin, Strutton, 2011) An elucidation of the way in which Facebook users respond to the display type of advertising would be beneficial for both marketers and platform providers.Ducoffe's (1995) Internet advertising model can be used as a theoretical framework for understanding how people respond to Facebook display advertisements. In the model the role of advertising value is highlighted and its determinants in the context of the Internet are identified. Accordingly, in this study we focused on the perceived values of advertising informativeness, entertainment, and irritation and the individual differences of usage intensity and brand page membership as the key factors influencing clicking onto display advertisements, which are the most common form on Facebook. As Facebook and its advertising are still evolving with respect to technological capabilities, achieving a comprehension of the new challenges that are relevant to advertising on Facebook and bringing about improvement of the effectiveness of this advertising are critical. Therefore, we sought to examine the antecedents of consumers' responses to Facebook display advertisements.