Originally published July 8 2005
Study concludes sponsored links don't lure in customers
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Science Daily features a study that showed internet users are more likely to use links from organic search results than links from paid sponsors when searching online.
Sponsored links are marketed as a sure-fire way to lure consumers to specific Web sites, but a Penn State study shows most online shoppers don't take the bait.
"Consumers have a bias against the links that businesses pay search engines to provide," said Jim Jansen, assistant professor in the Penn State School of Information Sciences and Technology (IST).
According to recent reports, businesses spent an estimated $8 billion to sell their products and services via sponsored links in 2004, despite little evidence that such advertising successfully directs traffic to Web sites.
The Penn State IST researcher presented that finding June 5 at the Sixth ACM Conference on E-commerce in Vancouver, Canada.
Details of the study are in a paper, "Examining Searching Perceptions of and Interactions with Sponsored Results," co-authored with Marc Resnick, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, Florida International University.
For the study, 56 participants from 18 to 29 years old -- the demographic most targeted by marketers -- evaluated the results from 330 e-commerce result queries submitted to a major search engine.
The researchers created a fictitious search engine to display one page of the results from the queries that ranged from looking for information on a class of products to looking for information on a product in a specific geographical location.
This meant that study participants who thought they were evaluating organic links sometimes were viewing sponsored links and vice versa.
"Prior research had noted a bias against sponsored links, but the question remaining was whether sponsored links were as good as organic links," Jansen said.
To make sponsored links a viable business model, search engines need to educate consumers, many of whom don't know what sponsored links are or how they appear on a page.
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