Buyer behavior · Randomized field experiment

How Does Prepopulating Search Bars with Keywords Affect Online Consumer Behavior? A Field Experiment

Marketing Science · 2025

Chenshuo Sun

Summary

Trending keywords increased chance of buying by 10.4% and spending by 8.8% versus an empty search bar.

For your marketing

Possible founder application

Useful for designing search suggestions and content discovery on a site or product. Test whether suggested paths help visitors find what they need without suppressing valuable self-directed exploration.

Reported result

What the study found

Trending keywords increased purchase incidence by 10.4% and spending by 8.8% versus an empty search bar. Personalized keywords increased these outcomes by 21% and 17%, respectively, but also reduced self-entered queries; niche terms had little impact.

Research question

What the authors investigated

How do prefilled search suggestions affect product discovery, search behavior, and purchases?

Design

Randomized field experiment testing trending, personalized, and niche keywords in a search bar.

Sample and setting

72,587 consumers on a large e-commerce platform.

Scope and transfer

Limitations to keep in view

One e-commerce platform and product-discovery interface. The abstract does not report longer-term effects or whether the shifts improve customer value, and search behavior may differ in technical software evaluation.

Research sources

INFORMS publisher abstract retrieved with Firecrawl; headline experiment results and sample are reported on the page.

Study strength

4.5/5 Strong design for its specific question

How this was assessed

The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.

Design · 2/2

Random assignment provides a strong comparison for effects in the tested setting.

Sample · 1/1

Large sample reported (72,587); size alone does not guarantee a representative sample.

Comparison · 1/1

Randomized comparison; confirm the control condition and analysis in the paper.

Can we check it? · 0.5/1

This profile could be checked against an abstract or metadata, not the full paper.

Double-blind? Blinding is not reported in the source reviewed; that does not establish whether blinding was or was not used.

Read the paper