Friendly, Appealing or Both?: Characterising User Experience in Sponsored Search Landing Pages

Many of today’s websites have recognised the importance of mobile friendly pages to keep users engaged and to provide a satisfying user experience. However, next to the experience provided by the sites themselves, advertisements, when clicked, present users with landing pages that are not necessarily mobile friendly. We explore what type of features are able to characterise the mobile friendliness of sponsored search ad landing pages. To have a complete understanding of the mobile ad experience in terms of layout and visual appearance, we also explore the notion of the ad page aesthetic appeal. We design and collect annotations for both dimensions on a large set of ads, and find that mobile friendliness and aesthetics represent different notions. We perform a comprehensive study of the effectiveness of over 120 features on the tasks of friendliness and aesthetics prediction. We find that next to general page size, HTML, and resource usage based features, several features based on the visual composition of landing pages are important to determine mobile friendliness and aesthetics. We demonstrate the additional benefit of these various types of features by comparing against the mobile friendliness guidelines provided by W3C. Finally, we use our models to determine the state of landing page mobile friendliness and aesthetics on a large sample of advertisements of a major internet company.