Understanding Mobile Searcher Attention with Rich Ad Formats

Mobile Search experiences have evolved significantly from a few blue links that require users to click. Recent search & ad units surface instant information to the user in a variety of visually rich formats that include images, horizontal swipes, and vertical scrolls. These innovative experiences call for new metrics & models to better understand searcher behavior on mobile phones. In this paper, we study how the presence of ads & their formats impacts searcher’s gaze & satisfaction. We systematically vary presentation format of the sponsored result, while controlling for other factors, such as position and quality of organic results. We experiment with several configurations of text ad and rich ad formats. Our findings indicate that showing rich ad formats improve search experience, by drawing more attention to the information-rich ad & allowing users to interact to view more offers, which increases user satisfaction with search. In addition, we extend prior work by comparing the performance of various models to infer user’s gaze from viewport data. Our models improve accuracy of existing viewport based gaze inference methods by 30% in Pearson’s correlation. Together, our findings show that viewport data can be used for fast, accurate and scalable measurement of user attention on a per-element basis, for both ads as well as organic search results.