Targeted Advertising in the Social Network "Vkontakte": the Effectiveness of Various Formats of Advertisements

Advertising tools in the social network «Vkontakte» offer a wide choice of promotion formats, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages, which prevents the most effective setting of targeted advertising. The main goal of the research is to identify the most effective format of an advertising banner in the social network «Vkontakte» by obtaining heat maps of user's attention. The study was conducted using a web eye tracker service «CoolTool» (https://cooltool.com), which fixate the movements of the respondent’s eyes, the number and duration of contacts with an advertisement, the time from the beginning of viewing the image to the first contact with the banner and emotions. The web eye tracker survey was accompanied by a number of closed and open-ended questions in order to reveal the dependence of the user's attention to advertising banners on other factors. As an additional method, an expert interview was conducted with experts on targeted advertising in social networks. The goal is to identify the most frequently used promotion formats and their comparison with the most effective formats for users. The main results obtained are: advertising in the side menu of the social network «Vkontakte» is the least effective compared to advertising banners of any format in the news feed; the most effective banner in terms of the number and duration of contacts is dynamic advertising in the news feed, and the least effective among the formats of placement in the news feed is the banner “with a button”; among specialists on targeted advertising there is no single most frequently used promotion format, since its choice depends on the goals; there is no link between the effectiveness of the advertising banner and the user's desire to purchase the advertised product. This work consists of two chapters: the first is about the theory of neuromarketing in advertising and targeted advertising in social networks, and the second about the study and results.