“I probably just skipped over it:” Using eye tracking to examine political Facebook advertising effectiveness –and avoidance

Abstract: Social media political advertising has, in recent years, been the target of a lot of interest and scrutiny from the public, scholars, and even the social media platforms themselves. While there is still some debate as to the overall effectiveness of social media political advertising there is compelling evidence to show that a number of social media users seek to avoid content that is political in nature. The present study sought to shed light on the understanding of how consumers actually view or avoid political advertising on social media by using eye-tracking equipment to map users eye scanpaths as they viewed a constructed social media news feed. It was found that users with high levels of political interest fundamentally view political advertising differently with different scanpaths than those who have low political interest levels.