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The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising—where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (nonsponsored) Web search results—is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique six-month panel data set of several hundred keywords collected from a large nationwide retailer that advertises on Google, we empirically model the relationship between different sponsored search metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per click, and ranking of advertisements. Our paper proposes a novel framework to better understand the factors that drive differences in these metrics. We use a hierarchical Bayesian modeling framework and estimate the model using Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods. Using a simultaneous equations model, we quantify the relationship between various keyword characteristics, position of the advertisement, and the landing page quality score on consumer search and purchase behavior as well as on advertiser's cost per click and the search engine's ranking decision. Specifically, we find that the monetary value of a click is not uniform across all positions because conversion rates are highest at the top and decrease with rank as one goes down the search engine results page. Though search engines take into account the current period's bid as well as prior click-through rates before deciding the final rank of an advertisement in the current period, the current bid has a larger effect than prior click-through rates. We also find that an increase in landing page quality scores is associated with an increase in conversion rates and a decrease in advertiser's cost per click. Furthermore, our analysis shows that keywords that have more prominent positions on the search engine results page, and thus experience higher click-through or conversion rates, are not necessarily the most profitable ones—profits are often higher at the middle positions than at the top or the bottom ones. Besides providing managerial insights into search engine advertising, these results shed light on some key assumptions made in the theoretical modeling literature in sponsored search.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a method that can gradually find a sweet spot between user experience and visual intensity of website elements to maximise user conversion with minimal adverse effect. Design/methodology/approach In the first phase of the study, the authors develop the method. In the second stage, the authors test and evaluate the method via an empirical study; also, an experiment was conducted within web interface with the gradual intensity of visual elements. Findings The findings reveal that the negative response grows faster than conversion when the visual intensity of the web interface is increased. However, a saturation point, where there is coexistence between maximum conversion and minimum negative response, can be found. Practical implications The findings imply that efforts to attract user attention should be pursued with increased caution and that a gradual approach presented in this study helps in finding a site-specific sweet spot for a level of visual intensity by incrementally adjusting the elements of the interface and tracking the changes in user behaviour. Originality/value Web marketing and advertising professionals often face the dilemma of determining the optimal level of visual intensity of interface element. Excessive use of marketing component and attention-grabbing visual elements can lead to an inferior user experience and consequent user churn due to growing intrusiveness. At the same time, too little visual intensity can fail to steer users. The present study provides a gradual approach which aids in finding a balance between user experience and visual intensity, maximising user conversion and, thus, providing a practical solution for the problem.

As colleges and universities rapidly closed due to COVID-19, students and faculty were faced with unique challenges. The pandemic forced the cancellation of all campus activities, both extra-curricular and program-focused, such as student teaching experiences and nursing clinical rotations. Additionally, instructors were forced to rethink content delivery as coursework was quickly moved online and administered remotely via virtual platforms. Students were impacted as university level programs underwent a major paradigm shift within a matter of days or weeks. This study examined perspectives of undergraduate and graduate students regarding their experiences with rapid conversion from on-ground, in-person courses to remote instruction during the spring 2020 semester. The researchers employed a QUAN-QUAL descriptive mixed methods design. Using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews, the researchers examined general perspectives on in-person learning before the pandemic; initial perceptions about remote learning; and perceptions of the students about effort, engagement, needs, and ethical behavior as they engaged in totally remote learning. Results, analyzed using SPSS (QUAN) and inter-coder agreement (QUAL), indicated that initially students were engaged and satisfied with their in-person instruction, but became less satisfied and engaged during remote instruction. Undergraduate students experienced feelings of increased frustration, decreased accountability and engagement during remote learning, and turned to collaboration to earn points as they finished the semester.

The sociological study of music consumption has tended to focus on general and typical experience instead of discrete or extraordinary experiences, consistently with a wider lack of biographical analysis. However, a popular topic among music fans is the phenomenon of peak music experiences: specific experiences involving music that are especially memorable, influential and even pivotal for the individuals involved. Drawing on the results of a pilot study conducted in Brisbane, Australia, this article shows that participants in the city’s indie music scene cite peak music experiences as central to their biographical narratives of inspiration, influence, conversion and motivation. These experiences make visible the more subtle processes by which musical meaning, taste and identity are constantly made and remade, as well as showing how encounters with music can affect subjectivities in an enduring way. The listeners are conscious of these processes, reflect on them and even try to create them.

Recent scholarship has employed racialization theory to make sense of the Muslim experience in the West. Research shows that if Muslims don religious markers—such as a hijab—they are racialized as ‘Muslim’ and associated with negative stereotypes concerning Islam. This (ethno)racialization has also been found to extend to white Muslim converts who wear these markers—sometimes subjecting them to anti-Muslim prejudice. The current study picks up this thread, comparing the experiences of converts who are white with those of people of color. In-depth interviews with 39 American converts to Islam reveal that their experiences of anti-Muslim prejudice differ sharply by race and by presentation of self. Findings suggest that white converts are only subjected to prejudice if they wear Muslim religious markers, not simply for having converted. Black converts who wear these markers are met with both positive and negative appraisals. I discuss my findings in light of what they tell us about the power of religious markers to (ethno)racialize their wearers, and the disruption these markers cause to the racial hierarchy—specifically that wearing Muslim religious markers is met with prejudice because it signals a challenge to the normativity of whiteness.

In contrast to the prevailing interpretation of capabilities as collectives, this inductive study of product development in a leading design firm highlights the centrality of the myriad ordinary activities that may shape the evolution of capabilities. A detailed comparison of 90 diverse product development processes over a 15-year period shows, first, that mindful microactivities carried out by individuals in and around the organization and at all levels of the organizational hierarchy are central in shaping the content of the product development capability and its dynamic adaptation. Understanding organizational renewal and competitive advantage may hence require a partial shift in focus from capabilities as aggregate entities, to the practical realities of core organizational processes. Second, this more fine-grained perspective leads to a set of insights on how organizational renewal may be partially shaped by timely managerial interventions aimed at encoding successful experiments into higher-level organizational capabilities. Third, higher-level capabilities resulting from the conversion of heterogeneous experiences display higher process homogeneity and a permanent increase in performance, because of stabilization of managerial attention. My findings contribute to unveiling the concept of capabilities, extending prior research on dynamic capabilities and organizational renewal and providing a lens for research on the microfoundations of capability evolution and organizational advantage.

E-commerce platforms continually strive to improve user engagement and increase sales conversion rates by providing highly pertinent product recommendations. This study investigates the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in an adaptive learning-to-rank framework to enhance the efficiency of E-commerce recommendation systems. The suggested architecture adapts to changing user preferences and variations in item popularity, improving the ranking of product suggestions to enhance user satisfaction and conversion rates. The system continually refines its suggestions in real-time by analyzing user interactions, ensuring that consumers are presented with the most relevant goods. An empirical assessment has shown that this adaptive learning-to-rank technique has major advantages. It has been demonstratedthat DNNs may greatly improve suggestions' relevance and accuracy in an E-commerce environment. The results of this study offer useful insights into the implementation of adaptive learning-to-rank systems, demonstrating their ability to revolutionize E-commerce platforms by enhancing user experience and increasing conversion rates.

First, Koester et al. (p. 366) address the intertwined issues of food insecurity among low-income families and children and how childcare centers can help reduce this insecurity by participating in the Child and Adult Care Feeding Program (CACFP). Unlike the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the CACFP is a less wellknown program that subsidizes healthy meals for children by reimbursing licensed childcare centers and daycare homes for those meals-sites that are more likely to serve children of lowincome parents.1,2 Koester et al. note that concerted efforts to make childcare providers aware of the CACFP and provide guidance on how to overcome administrative hurdles to enrollment are necessary, highlighting how difficult it can be to access federal food assistance programs.Next, Ward et al. (p. 387) provide the first, to their knowledge, multiyear and nationwide analysis of fatal and nonfatal police shootings, providing evidence of racial disparities in total injury burden that are more severe than shown in previous studies that examined fatal shootings alone. These findings, as summarized by Zare (p. 384) and Nix (p. 382), are evidence of the lack of accountability at local, state, and federal levels for police officers' use of deadly force-reflecting the structural racism that is deeply rooted in efforts to control and subjugate people of color and people from low-income communities.Finally, two research articles that merit recognition deal with issues that affect historically marginalized people. Tran et al. (p. 424) report findings showing that transgender and nonbinary people, particularly those from minoritized racial and ethnic backgrounds, experience greater exposure to conversion practices that begin at younger ages. These findings are especially troubling in the current US sociopolitical landscape, where more and more states are passing legislation that is hostile to transgender and nonbinary individuals as well as the broader sexual and gender minority community. Facente et al. (p. 435) show that funding for syringe exchange programs, one of the most cost-effective HIV prevention interventions, does not meet the level necessary and recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to offer comprehensive programmingto reduce HIV and other physical and mental health burdens among injection drug users.In addition, an editorial by Wagner and Michaels (p. 372) highlights the importance of occupational safety as fundamental to public health. Although the COVID-19 pandemic prompted attention to the health and safety- both physical and mental-of frontline essential and health care workers, who are overwhelmingly of low income and people of color, the integration of occupational safety and public health beyond emergency situations is necessary. And as occupation and occupational hazards are social determinants of health, government agencies that provide oversight and protect against occupational hazards require greater funding and resources to protect and promote the health of workers, their families, and their communities.

[...]there is at least one group of people for which the question is not perplexing at all-a diverse and informal collection of disenchanted or former evangelical Christians variously called ex-evangelicals, Xvangelicals, or exvangelicals. Much like the conversion narratives of their nineteenth-century evangelical and seventeenth-century Puritan forebears, twenty-first-century exvangelicals tend to tell their stories of deconversion as transformations from old to new, from death to life, from darkness to light. Mannon, for instance, uses the term \"Xvangelical,\" as does the journalist Anne Helen Petersen, to refer specifically to evangelical \"women typically in their thirties and forties, white and middle class, who see their faith in terms of relationship and freedom rather than politics and dogma\" (Mannon 145). Since I am focusing on a wider spectrum of narratives, I am not using \"Xvangelical,\" but rather exvangelical, which has been the preferred term by key figures, as well as the title of a podcast that has been central to the movement (Chastain). The experience of conversion is so central to evangelical Christianity that to give an account of leaving evangelicalism is nearly impossible for many Christians and ex-Christians to do apart from the concept of conversion, even if the conversion in question is a turn away from evangelicalism and toward something else. According to scholars such as Patricia Caldwell and Jerald Brauer, this genre emerged first in the American colonies, where, as Brauer observes, \"church membership was confined only to people who could demonstrate the genuineness of their conversion experience publicly before the church. . . .

Consumers’ feedback helps firms, yet most requests for feedback are unanswered. Research on question–behavior effects suggests that providing feedback on prior experiences might influence subsequent consumption behavior, but provides little insight regarding users who decline requests (e.g., by clicking “No, Thanks”). Accordingly, we investigate whether the exposure to a request to rate a consumption experience influences users’ future conversion regardless of their compliance. We carried out two large-scale field studies in collaboration with a leading international website that offers basic service for free, and additional desirable features for a fee (“freemium”). We exposed users to a rating request and measured their subsequent likelihood of converting to the paid service. Users exposed to a rating request were more likely to convert compared with users who were not exposed; this effect persisted over 90 days. Notably, users who complied with the request were no more likely to convert compared with non-compliers.