Advertising turns into an effective means of marketing communication. According to Yaveroglu and Donthu (2008), most marketers are now taking advantage of the internet revolution to make their products accessible to the world. One of the forms of media that acts as a medium of influencing the target consumer as well as the sales is the social media. Social media has become an effective tool in the hands of advertisers to promote and sell products and services because the internet is the fastest developing choice, it has become ubiquitous and also offers certain advantages compared with other forms of media. In addition, Bakshi and Gupta (2013) stated that with ever increasing number of customers on these social media platforms, social media is projected to ramp up its revenue generating activities.
Pop-up ads are forms of online advertising on the world wide web. A pop-up ad is a graphical user interface display area, usually a small window, that suddenly appears in the foreground of the visual interface. In online advertising, pop-up ads are highly visible and more effective than banner ads. They are versatile and can accommodate most types of advertisements. For advertisers, this remains one of the most popular methods to reach out to online consumers, as the click-through rates are higher than other forms of advertising. In other words, the return on investment for pop-up ads is high. When pop-up ads are used properly with the webpage, it can lead to better branding, as they have potential to leave a lasting impact with viewers.
According to Blackwell (2014), Consumer behavior is the actions and the decision processes of people who purchase goods and services for personal consumption. Consumers buying behaviour has always been given so much importance and space in the literature study of the impact of advertising regarding its effectiveness (Ajzen, 2002). The dislikes and likes of the consumer depends on consumers buying behaviour towards the advertisement of the product advertised. A good quality advertisement is likely to influence consumers into buying that product while a poor quality advertisement will do the opposite.
However, pop-up ads and all the other forms of online advertisements have taken a lot of pressure on consumer behavior because they believe that pop-up ads are intrusive. It is one of the problems that the marketers encountered because pop-up ads happen to be the scapegoat for all the people that hate advertising.
Nevertheless, there is the need for an objective analysis of consumer perception. This study aims to explore and investigate the determinants of consumer behavior towards the pop-up advertising because there are some consumers who seem to prefer not to be interrupted from scrolling on social media so it ends up with diverting their attention towards closing the pop-up windows containing the ads. However, there are also consumers who are still into pop-up ads. As Shaik (2002) revealed, customers are willing to adopt modern marketing techniques since they don’t have time to visit the shops. They want all information on a click of a button. Where they can quickly and easily have information about the product, simply by clicking on a link.