Targeting ads based on consumers’ real-time locations has evolved into a practice worth billions of dollars in the advertising industry. Yet, the implications of repeated mobile ad exposure are poorly understood, primarily due to the confounding effects of locational context. This paper seeks to bridge this gap. Using two large datasets comprising more than three million observations from a major European mobile telecommunication company, we investigate how ad repetition and location revisits (i.e., returning to a previously visited location) jointly determine consumer response to mobile display advertising. Our empirical strategy leverages coarsened exact matching combined with a logit model with fixed effects at the consumer-location level. We find that the click rate through ads is more than 26 percent higher at revisited locations compared to locations visited for the first time. However, mobile ad repetition decreases click rates, and this effect is amplified at revisited locations. Our results contribute to the theory and practice of mobile advertising.
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