In this paper, we analyze the relationship between performance and use of brand terms in the key phrases that link advertisements to searcher queries. We use data that consist of more than 2.5 ...million daily records from a key word advertising campaign of a major U.S. retailer. The campaign spanned nearly four years, involved approximately $8 million in advertising cost, and generated more than $23 million in sales. We categorize key phrases and advertisements as either brand focused or non-brand focused. Using analysis of variance in a 2 × 2 design, we analyze use of branded terms on the critical key word advertising metrics of number of clicks, cost per click, sales revenue generated, number of orders, number of items ordered, and return on advertising cost, as well as number of impressions triggered by these key phrases. Therefore, we investigate a significant spectrum of user actions and consumer behaviors in a sponsored search campaign. Our findings show that there is a significant advantage to matching branding terms in key phrases and advertisements relative to any other combination of key phrase or advertisement for all the metrics examined. A combination of a branded phrase and a branded advertisement generated 15 times more sales revenue than any other combination of phrase and advertisement. Therefore, a focus by key word advertisers on branded terms for search engine ads could be quite beneficial for both the effectiveness and efficiency of key word advertising. The implication for online advertising and key word search in the e-commerce domain, especially for large retailers, is that brand mentions in both key phrase and advertisements correlate with higher conversions.
This paper aims to describe how a digital marketing simulation system improve the knowledge and skills of students, as well as their status as members of a virtual community, which gradually evolve ...from novice to expert in managing online advertising campaigns. The body of the article encompasses three contributions: the know-how of the Simbound Game author, the practical experiences of an instructor, who coordinated students’ activities during three courses and of a Master student – the leader of a team which got the first position after the completion of a game. The advantages of managing no-risk online advertising campaigns are revealed and the students are able to understand how various online marketing tools become useful while a firm expands its operations in e-commerce and must fulfill new tasks and responsibilities. The paper concludes with the practical implications of the Simbound simulation-based learning and the ideas included in the future research agenda.
Predicting Web Page Status Pant, Gautam; Srinivasan, Padmini
Information systems research,
06/2010, Letnik:
21, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The World Wide Web has become a key intermediary between producers and consumers of information. Web's linkage structure has been exploited by contemporary search engines to decrease the search cost ...for consumers while usually also rewarding the producers of higher
status
Web pages. In addition to influencing visibility and accessibility, in-links, as marks of recognition, accord status to a Web page. In this paper we show how Web page status may be predicted at least in part by page location and topic specificity. Moreover, we observe that the "philanthropic" contributions of a Web page-specifically, contributions of information brokerage function-are also good predictors of in-links. The observations are made in the presence of domain- and topic-specific effects. Interestingly, all of these features that may predict status are "local" to a given Web page and within the control of the owner/author of the page. This is in contrast to the "global" nature of Web linkage-based metrics such as in-link count that are derived as a result of downloading and indexing billions of pages. Because the linkage structure of the Web affects browsing, crawling, and retrieval, our results have implications for vertical and general search, business intelligence, and content management.
Buyers using search engines to look for information tend to trust and follow links displayed in the editorial section of the search-results page. Most on-line sellers, however, do not invest in ...search engine optimization (SEO) to get higher search-results rankings for their listings, but instead prefer paid placements. They explain that SEO is more expensive than paid placements, produces results that do not justify its cost, and does not consistently lead to high search-results rankings. This implies that sellers would invest in SEO if it were less expensive and its rankings were more consistent. However, even if SEO and paid placement cost the same, and SEO always produced high rankings, paid placement would still be the search engine marketing (SEM) strategy of choice for most on-line sellers. Interestingly, no optimal SEM strategy includes SEO. These findings are especially significant for advertising professionals who have to justify investing in paid placements despite overwhelming evidence that buyers ignore them and follow links in the editorial section of the search-results page.
Search marketing traffic and performance models Fiorini, Pierre M.; Lipsky, Lester R.
Computer standards and interfaces,
November 2012, 2012-11-00, 20121101, Letnik:
34, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the practice of manipulating and/or paying the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) to drive traffic to websites. The SEM community has developed techniques ...that can channel visitors to websites; however, little work has been done to develop models able to estimate the amount of traffic generated by SEM. In this paper, we develop formulae that can be used to estimate traffic resulting from SEM campaigns that can be used by search marketing agencies for competition analysis and by web hosting providers for performance analysis and capacity planning. Our experimental results show that our models work best for targeted marketing campaigns, but the formulae presented can be generalized to broader marketing domains.
► We develop models to estimate traffic resulting from search marketing campaigns. ► The models can be used by agencies for competition analysis and performance modeling. ► Our experimental results show our models work best for targeted marketing campaigns.
Any e-commerce venture using a website as the main shop front should invest in marketing its website. In this study, the relationship between website owners having invested in search engine ...optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC), respectively, is investigated. The design used in this research involves an empirical field experimental approach in which implementation of both SEO and PPC are considered, with subsequent comparison of results. Data were gathered from Google search results after performing both Fat Head and Long Tail key-phrase searches based in various categories. Websites that were listed among the top 10 in the sponsored section of search results were recorded. These websites were then checked to see if they also had an SEO ranking within the top 100 for both the Fat Head and Long Tail key-phrases. It is found that website owners seldom invest in SEO as part of a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign. This seems to confirm some of the findings by other authors. This research has important implications for SEO and PPC practitioners, and for website owners. It should influence the way budgets on search engine marketing are applied. Finally, it could be used by marketing managers in better utilizing their limited SEM dollars. No evidence could be found that this kind of empirical research has been done, hence the results are considered to be unique.
Search engine marketing is currently the most popular form of online advertising. Many advertising agencies and bloggers claim that the success of search engine marketing is driven by the “long ...tail”, defined in this research as the many less popular keywords employed by users to search the Internet, and suggest that search engine marketing campaigns need to have hundreds or thousands of keywords to accommodate this phenomenon. We doubt this claim. Our data from three search engine marketing campaigns in two countries, which report the success of a total of 4908 keywords over 36
weeks, covering 10,104,015 searches and 492,735 clicks, show that the top 20% of all keywords attract on average 98.16% of all searches and generate 97.21% of all clicks. The use of the top 100 keywords in each campaign attracts on average 88.57% of all searches and 81.40% of all clicks. These results are fairly stable across a varying total number of keywords in use and suggest that the success of search engine marketing is driven by relatively few keywords. However, we also show that the set of the top 100 keywords changes over time. Hence, advertisers need to concentrate on finding the top
100 keywords, but they do not need to bother too much about the performance of keywords in the long tail.
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