Repeated Exposures to Mobile Advertising : The Role of Location Revisits

Mobile sensing technologies enable firms to target ads based on consumers’ real-time locations. While this practice may repeatedly expose consumers to the same ad, the impact of mobile ad repetition is poorly understood since it is typically confounded with locational context effects. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap. Using two large datasets comprising more than three million observations from a major European mobile telecommunication company, we investigate how ad repetition and location revisits (returning to a previously visited location) jointly determine consumer response to mobile display advertising. Our modeling approach is based on a two-stage generalized linear model with random intercepts. We find that the first impression of an ad increases the click odds by 54 percent at revisited locations compared to locations visited for the first time. However, mobile ad repetition decreases click rates, and this effect is amplified at revisited locations. Our results contribute to the theory and practice of mobile advertising