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The Comparative Effectiveness of Sponsored and Non-Sponsored Links for Web Ecommerce Queries (2007)
| Venue: | ACM Transactions on the Web |
| Citations: | 27 - 4 self |
BibTeX
@ARTICLE{Jansen07thecomparative,
author = {Bernard J. Jansen},
title = {The Comparative Effectiveness of Sponsored and Non-Sponsored Links for Web Ecommerce Queries},
journal = {ACM Transactions on the Web},
year = {2007},
volume = {1}
}
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Abstract
The predominant business model for Web search engines is sponsored search, which generates billions in yearly revenue. But are sponsored links providing online consumers with relevant choices for products and services? We address this and related issues by investigating the relevance of sponsored and nonsponsored links for e-commerce queries on the major search engines. The results show that average relevance ratings for sponsored and nonsponsored links are practically the same, although the relevance ratings for sponsored links are statistically higher. We used 108 ecommerce queries and 8,256 retrieved links for these queries from three major Web search engines: Yahoo!, Google, and MSN. In addition to relevance measures, we qualitatively analyzed the e-commerce queries, deriving five categorizations of underlying information needs. Product-specific queries are the most prevalent (48%). Title (62%) and summary (33%) are the primary basis for evaluating sponsored links with URL a distant third (2%). To gauge the effectiveness of sponsored search campaigns, we analyzed the sponsored links from various viewpoints. It appears that links from organizations with large sponsored search campaigns are more relevant than the average sponsored link. We discuss the implications for Web search engines and sponsored search as a long-term business model and as a mechanism for finding relevant information for searchers.
Keyphrases
web ecommerce query sponsored link non-sponsored link comparative effectiveness nonsponsored link web search engine e-commerce query product-specific query average relevance rating sponsored search campaign relevant information relevance rating predominant business model yearly revenue related issue major web search engine average sponsored link online consumer major search engine information need primary basis ecommerce query various viewpoint long-term business model distant third search campaign relevant choice
