Search advertising is one of the most important forms of electronic commerce. While click-through rates are considered a key measure of search advertising effectiveness by search providers, brand attention can also be a valuable objective. Our paper reports on an experiment that investigated how search advertisement placement affected search users’ brand recall and recognition. The results showed that semantically associated search ads generated significantly higher levels of brand attention than contextually associated ones. Significant interaction effects were found among search ad position, keyword association, and search result quality. Implications for decision makers are discussed.
Search engines play a major role in many companies’ Internet marketing strategies [7] and [16]. The popularity of search engines as a gateway for accessing Internet resources has given rise to an important form of electronic commerce: search advertising. Search advertising allows advertisers to target their ads with search keywords, and display them alongside search results. A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers stated that search advertising revenue in the US reached $5.1 billion in the first half of 2009 and represented 47% of all Internet advertising revenues, while banner ads generated $2.4 billion in the same period. Search advertising revenue growth may be partially attributable to the revolutionary auction-based pay-for-click advertising model. Despite its importance, search advertising has not received as much attention in research as other forms of advertising [5].
Search advertising differs from banner advertising in two critical aspects. First, most search ads are text-based, consisting of a title, a description, and a link to a landing page. Advertisers have little latitude in controlling design elements such as color, image, and animation commonly used in banner advertising to attract users’ attention, or make their ads stand out. Second, unlike banner ads that may be displayed on any part of a web page, search ads are displayed together with competing advertisements on either the top or right-hand side of the search results. Although major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft use different algorithms for ad placement, the search ad's position is determined by the keyword's popularity and how much an advertiser is willing to pay when the ad is clicked. Given these constraints, advertisers face two crucial decisions in planning a search advertising campaign:
(1) with what keywords should the search ad be associated, and
(2) how much should we bid for these keywords.
The first decision determines the search result pages on which the ad will be presented, while the second determines the page location at which the ad will appear.As a service to their subscribers, search-advertising programs offer advice on where and how search ads should be placed. For instance, Google recommends that one should only bid on keywords that are “relevant” to the products or services to be advertised. It provides a keyword selection tool which generates “relevant” keywords based on a search term. It also suggests that top-positioned ads will produce better results than side-positioned ads by charging higher prices for top-positioned ads. Since Google and other search engines have access to proprietary information about how users interact with and respond to search ads, few have questioned the validity and applicability of this “conventional wisdom”.
Given the pay-for-click model employed by search advertising programs, it is reasonable to assume that their advice is geared toward increasing the click-through rate, which is defined as the number of clicks divided by the total number of times an ad is displayed. While click-through is an important measure of advertising effectiveness, brand awareness and attitude toward the ad are also valuable measures [13]. Consequently, an important research consideration is whether advertisers should pursue marketing campaign objectives other than those driven by the desire to maximize click-throughs.
One may argue that a click-through maximizing strategy should also achieve brand awareness objectives, because attention to a search ad is a prerequisite to click-through; but it seems plausible that search users may notice an ad and form positive impressions about the brand without clicking. With a pay-for-click model, companies may be able to maximize the value of their search advertising budgets if they are able to generate brand awareness using a minimum number of click-throughs. Furthermore, companies can avoid bidding-wars by exploring alternative ad placement strategies.
Our research therefore focused on the impact of a search ad on brand attention, which was defined as a search user's recall and recognition of a brand displayed in a search ad. Specifically, we examined how the placement of a search ad could affect brand recall and recognition by a search-user through the theoretical lens of the limited capacity model of attention and the theories of search behavior. We investigated three variables related to search ad recall and recognition: ad positioning, search ad–keyword association, and search result quality. Here we report on the results of an experiment conducted to assess the effects of these variables on search users’ recall and recognition of search ads.
Evidence points to search advertising as one of the most important modalities of e-commerce. As such, companies require a clear strategy for placing search ads in order to achieve their campaign objectives. Companies are increasingly recognizing the role of non-transactional performance metrics, such as brand attention, in assessing the performance of their online advertising efforts. Recognizing the differences in information processing between search users and web browsers, we applied the limited-capacity model of attention to explore the ad placement conditions under which brand names shown in search ads would be noticed and recalled by search users. Results provided useful insights into the interactions between search users’ information processing and their attention to search ads placed in different positions and contexts.
