Click-through Rates and Consumer Satisfaction: A Pilot Study Analyzing the Preferences of South Korean Online News Consumers

Abstract

Consumers often respond negatively to news information owing to a lack of information in notification messages. This pilot study compares consumer satisfaction and click-through rates between an existing application and our newly-developed news notification application that shows emoticons and text summaries. Eighty South Korean adults with prior experience in using news notification applications were randomly divided into four groups of 20 for this study. One of the following conditions of receiving news notifications was assigned to each group: news without additional information, news with emoticons, news with text summary, and news with both emoticons and text summary. We found that the average click-through rate and average satisfaction score were significantly higher among participants who saw the additional text summary. Similar results were observed for consumer satisfaction and visualizing emoticons. Our findings indicate that information abundance increases consumer satisfaction. Mobile technology that provides information delivery methods that complement consumers’ needs may lead to higher consumer satisfaction levels.