Moderating the app publishers-controlled effects

In recent years, advertising in mobile apps has become one of the most popular advertising channels for businesses. The annual spending for this emerging type of advertising keeps increasing year after year. Despite its popularity in practice, background theory of mobile in-app advertising is, however, still in its infancy. More research on this new topic is therefore needed, both from conceptual and empirical perspectives. The question that how to further enhance the effectiveness of advertising in mobile apps still persists and is more urgent than ever before. This type of advertising also witnesses the rise of new participants, noticeably the app publisher who has received the least attention in the advertising literature, almost absent in previous effectiveness models while their goal of maximizing revenue sometimes contradicts with other participants. Only until recently, there are more studies on the role of publishers on the effectiveness of mobile advertising, and more factors controlled by the publishers were identified. In this paper, we extended those publishers-related studies to evaluate the moderating effects of contextual factors on the effects of the publishers-controlled factors using both Moderated Regression Analysis and Multigroup Moderated Analysis techniques on a set of ad click data that have been collected over six months. By doing so, this research helps us to understand more about the role of app publishers and the effects of their controlled factors. Practically, this research could help to increase global revenue even higher by selecting the optimal combination of the factors controlled by the publishers and those controlled by other participants