How Do Sponsored Search Results Affect User Behavior in Web Search?

Abstract

Sponsored search has gained considerable attention in Web search-related studies. In this paper, we investigate into the user interaction process on search engine result pages (SERPs) considering the influence of sponsored search results. We integrate different styles of sponsored links into SERPs to systematically study how they affect users’ behavioral preferences. Based on an analysis into users’ eye movements and click-through behavior, we showed that different presentation styles among sponsored links might lead to different behavior biases, not only for the sponsored search results but also for the organic ones. We also showed that search task type might influence the click-through of sponsored links, whereas this factor has little effect on the visual attention that users devote to top sponsored results. Interestingly, it seems that user satisfaction, which was intuitively measured by participants, was unaffected by the different sponsored search result appearances. These results help us better understand how users interact with search engines and how we can improve the placement of sponsored search results on SERPs.