Examining the Impact of Sponsored Search Results on Choice: An Anchoring Perspective

Online sponsored search advertising has emerged as a dominant form of advertising. While prior research has investigated the impact of such advertising as a signal for the advertiser, it has largely neglected the impact of sponsored ads on subsequent choice and evaluations. Using a mixed-method approach combining secondary data from a large hotel aggregator and experimental studies, the present work investigates the effect of anchoring, a commonly used heuristic in the context of online search. This research indicates that a sponsored (i.e., paid) search result acts as an anchor influencing subsequent consumer choice when it is shown as the first-ranked result. The strength of the anchoring effect varies across multiple factors, including the similarity of other search results and the size of the search device screen.