Content and sharing · Randomized field experiment
How Does Prepopulating Search Bars with Keywords Affect Online Consumer Behavior? A Field Experiment
Sun, C. (2025). Marketing Science, 44(6), 1217–1231.
Plain-English take
Trending keywords increased chance of buying by 10.4% and spending by 8.8% versus an empty search bar. For your marketing: This may be useful for designing search suggestions and content discovery on a site or product.
How much weight to give this
4.5/5 Strong design for its specific question
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.
Random assignment provides a strong comparison for effects in the tested setting.
Large sample reported (72,587); size alone does not guarantee a representative sample.
Randomized comparison; confirm the control condition and analysis in the paper.
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.
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.
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.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
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.
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.
Evidence access
Publisher abstract; full text may require access
INFORMS publisher abstract retrieved with Firecrawl; headline experiment results and sample are reported on the page.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.