User Acceptance of Information Feed Advertising: A Hybrid Method Based on SEM and QCA

Abstract

It is of great significance for enterprises’ development to effectively use mobile Internet to carry out information feed advertising. This paper aims to study the influence factors and effect of the users’ acceptance intention of information feed advertising through empirical analysis to provide references for further optimizing information feed advertising strategy. Traditional quantitative analysis methods, such as the Structural Equation Model (SEM), can only measure a single factor’s influence from an individual perspective. Therefore, we introduce the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and present a two-stage hybrid method based on SEM and QCA. In the first stage, we analyze the influence of a single variable on the acceptance intention of information feed advertising by SEM. Then, in the second stage, we analyze the impact of different variable combinations by QCA. Based on the actual questionnaire data, we define six independent variables and use AMOS, SPSS, and fsQCA to carry out SEM analysis and the fuzzy-set-based QCA analysis, respectively. The SEM analysis results show that the four factors (including consistency, informativeness, sociability, and advertising reward) have a significant positive impact on user acceptance of information feed advertising. On the contrary, perceived advertising clustering has a significant negative impact. In addition, accuracy has no considerable effect. The QCA analysis reveals that seven constructs of six variables can all significantly enhance information feed ads’ acceptance intention.