The Effect of Location and Congruency of Text Ads on Information Search

Almost half of all advertising revenues are attributed to the sponsored links on pages generated by search engines (IAB, 2008). This drives the need to better understand how users view and search the contents of a search engine results page that includes sponsored links. In the current study, we manipulated whether target information was located in sponsored links at the top or on the right side of a search result page. We also manipulated the congruency of the sponsored ad content. Results indicate that the target location influenced search performance but not recall. Congruency, on the other hand, did not influence search performance or recall. Also, task success did not influence recall. This might indicate that location is a stronger determinant for search task success than the semantic relevance of the sponsored links with the search query. Target location influenced fixations on the main results, top and side sponsored links.