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Are 40 Percent of “Ordinary People” Unaware That SERP Links They Click On Are Paid?

Didit Editorial

July 16, 2013: New research from the UK claims to demonstrate that 41 percent of people clicking on paid Google links are unaware that these links are advertisements.

CEO Rob Stevens of Bunnyfoot (which conducted the study), quoted in the article cited above, notes that “there is a world of people out there who don’t know adwords are ads, and marketers should be wary of making assumptions that remove them from a true consumer perspective. We were astounded by the numbers when they first came in but there can be no doubt about it: a significant slice of internet users simply don’t recognise Adwords listings as sponsored links.”

The findings involved a small 100-person panel of “ordinary people,” so it is possible that the small sample size influenced results. Still, such findings — if they can be replicated by other larger scale surveys — should bolster recent efforts by regulatory agencies such as the FTC to persuade search engines to do more to distinguish paid and unpaid results. Doing so would benefit many marketers as well, given that the intent of users  who do not know that they are clicking on an ads is not likely to be conducive to completing a purchase or otherwise consummating a conversion.

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