Consumer Engagement with Online Advertising
Summary
Consumer engagement with online advertising encompasses the multifaceted ways in which individuals interact with digital marketing content across increasingly personalised, ubiquitous environments. Engagement metrics extend beyond traditional click‐through rates to include attention allocation, emotional response and subsequent behaviours, reflecting cognitive, affective and behavioural dimensions. Advances in tracking and targeting have enhanced ad relevance but also amplified concerns over intrusiveness, privacy and perceived risk, driving diverse avoidance strategies. The rise of video, native mobile and rich‐media formats alongside social commerce tools has expanded engagement pathways while intensifying competition for consumer attention. Theoretical frameworks—such as Stimulus‐Organism‐Response and Approach‐Avoidance models—elucidate how ad stimuli evoke internal reactions that shape viewing behaviours, brand attitudes and purchase intentions. Globally, advertisers and platforms seek to balance personalisation with user experience, experimenting with adaptive ad durations, incentive structures and value exchanges to foster positive engagement and sustain the digital advertising ecosystem.
Research from Nature Portfolio
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Consumer Engagement with Online Advertising publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in consumer engagement with online advertising across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Online behavioural advertising: personalised advertising based on users’ tracked online activities to match their interests.
Ad avoidance: deliberate consumer actions to ignore, skip or block online advertisements.
Perceived intrusiveness: the extent to which an advertisement is seen as interrupting or disrupting the user experience.
Cognitive, affective and behavioural avoidance: classification of avoidance into mental resistance, emotional responses and overt avoidance actions.
Reciprocal altruism: strategy offering incentives or rewards in exchange for consumer attention to reduce ad irritation.
Stimulus‐Organism‐Response (SOR) theory: framework explaining how external stimuli evoke internal states that lead to behavioural outcomes.
References
- Social commerce advertising avoidance and shopping cart abandonment: A fs/QCA analysis of German consumers. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services (2022).
- Research on the Influence Mechanism of Consumers’ Perceived Risk on the Advertising Avoidance Behavior of Online Targeted Advertising. Frontiers in Psychology (2022).
- The Mitigators of Ad Irritation and Avoidance of YouTube Skippable In-Stream Ads: An Empirical Study in Taiwan. Information (2021).
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