Abstract: The flourishing online advertising has motivated numerous enterprises to utilize this medium for product promotion. However, a problem demanding prompt solution is how to attract consumers' attention in a short time and effectively increase the click-through rate of online advertising. Focusing on the position of brand words in online advertisements and based on relevant theories such as the attention mechanism and implicit memory, this study takes discount advertisements from Vipshop as the research object to empirically explore the mechanism of how the position of brand words in advertisements influences consumers' click behavior. The findings are as follows. Consumer click behavior is negatively affected by brand word position, but specifically, as the brand word position moves backward, consumer click behavior presents an inverted U shape; and this effect is moderated by the brand awareness and discount rate; the higher the brand awareness, the stronger the negative effect of the brand word position on consumers' click behavior; the larger discount ratio, the stronger negative effect of brand word position on consumers' click behavior.

Key words: location effect, attention mechanism, consumer click behavior, brand awareness