Jansen examined more than seven million interactions from hundreds of thousands of users to analyze the click-through patterns on both sponsored and non-sponsored links. Specifically studying the rate of clicks where the sponsored and non-sponsored ads are presented together, Jansen was investigating what effect this had on consumer behavior.
"I was expecting that an integrated list of sponsored and non-sponsored ads would have a higher click through on the sponsored ads," Jansen said. When the click-through rate turned out to be only 15 percent, Jansen was astounded.