Is this for me? How Consumers Respond to Personalized Advertising on Social Network Sites

Abstract

We study the impact of perceived personalization on consumer responses to advertising on Facebook, a popular social network site (SNS). Based on two experiments, we test a moderated mediation model with perceived relevance as the mediator and respondents' attitudes toward Facebook as the moderator of the relationship between perceived personalization on one hand and brand attitude and click intention on the other. The results show that perceived personalization improves responses toward Facebook ads, through perceived relevance. The moderating impact of attitude toward Facebook is significant only in the second study. There, the positive effect of perceived personalization of Facebook advertisements on click intention is stronger for participants with more positive attitudes toward Facebook.

Keywords:

• social media
• online advertising
• personalization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their assistance during the review process.