The Ethics of Ads and Clicks
by Tran, Harry ~ April 27th, 2009. Filed under: Rants n Raves.Today I was thinking of planning a late year flight from Seattle to San Francisco and wanted to do some quick comparison shopping research ahead of time.
While I knew Virgin America was flying through both destinations I didn’t know the exact url to visit. Rather than typing in virgin dot com and not knowing exactly where that would take me I went to trusty Google and typed in Virgin Airlines flights to San Francisco.
As you can see I’m given the following options.Essentially both links surrounded by my little red box lead to the same exact website. They both point you to www.VirginAmerica.com
What I did notice was the direct link to the site was not only on the search results section but also on the sponsored links section right above it. Now anyone who knows a bit about ppc marketing knows that by clicking the sponsored link would cost Virgin some cost whereas clicking the naturally generated link would not.
How do people feel when they are faced with such a decision?
I mean if the exact same links were there and you wanted to do some research or place an order for tickets do you click the link that’s naturally pulled up or the sponsored one? I mean why would anyone want to click the sponsored link if the results they were looking for were provided in the natural search results section.
What are your thoughts on this delicate matter I call “The Ethics of Ad Clicks.”
