Testing Web Site Design and Promotional Content

University of Southern California. The authors would like to express their gratitude to Kurt Eto for allowing them to use his Web site in the name of science. 2Abstract The World Wide Web has grown at a spectacular rate as a medium for promoting and marketing products and services. At the same time, little is known about the effectiveness of advertising on the Internet. Yet, the Web offers unique, but so far largely unexplored, research opportunities for measuring and analyzing the effectiveness of promotional content. In this paper, we develop and apply a conjoint analysis-based methodology to evaluate the design and the effectiveness of promotional content on the Web. This methodology is shown to be ideally suited for this purpose by virtue of its unobtrusiveness, external validity, large sample sizes, timeliness, as well as its low implementation cost.