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The paper aims to develop and validate an instrument to measure users’ perceptions of online personalized advertising.

First, we identified 12 different aspects of online personalized advertisement and formulated candidate items through a literature review. A card sorting study and expert review were conducted to generate the initial scale items. We then conducted one survey (n = 308) to create a reliable measurement instrument and another (n = 296) to validate the instrument. Finally, we tested how the dimensions of the OPAD-Perception Framework can be used to differentiate between different levels of ad sensitivity, control/no control over the ad personalization process, and different levels of granularity of ad explanation.

The resulting OPAD-Perception Framework contains 49 Likert-formatted questions measuring ten distinct dimensions of online personalized advertising: reliability, usefulness, transparency, interactivity, targeting accuracy, accountability, creepiness, willingness to rely on, self-actualization, and persuasion.

The OPAD-Perception Framework can serve as a powerful tool to measure users’ attitudes toward online personalized advertising. This will enable advertisers and social media platforms to better support users’ privacy expectations and provide user-friendly interfaces for controlling the ad personalization process.