The Perfect Online Ad
Abstract
The internet has opened up many marketing opportunities and the already huge potential of the internet has become even bigger as a result of the latest developments in web search engines. These engines provide a new channel of marketing which proves to be great asset to many marketing campaigns: Search Engine Advertisement (SEA). SEA has become interesting to a very large group of marketers and has become very valuable tool. Important question that remains however; how to properly use this tool and use it to full potential? In SEA most ads have the same format; no images and no possible 'gimmicks' to attract consumers’ attention. In order to fully make use of the enormous potential of SEA, one should really explore which message formats perform well and which do not. So one could ask themselves: "What advertising message is effective in SEA?"
The aim of this study is to find an answer to this question and explore undiscovered terrain in SEA. The thesis will provide empirical evidence of which types of advertisements are successful, it provides a clear framework for marketers or any business owner who wants to set up a successful SEA-campaign. Considering the huge potential of SEA it is also very much worth to explore the terrain of SEA and contribute to the knowledge of scholars and marketers.
In this research a framework is constructed by using theories on effective advertisement messages. The framework provides a couple of potential ad formats and hypotheses are formulated about their expected performance. These hypotheses are tested by looking ad empirical data. This data is derived from an advertisement campaign for an animal web shop in Google AdWords. The empirical data paints an interesting picture without, unfortunately, providing a clear answer to what ad format is the best performer. It does point out ad formats which clearly underperform and the data provides information which can be used as guidelines in future SEA campaigns. The most important conclusion one can draw from the data is that the use of an interrogative ad format is definitely not recommended. Another negative recommendation is also justified for the use of a brand name, especially in the body of an ad. In fact, the ads with a brand name in the body are the worst performers of al tested combination.
Apart from these ad variations which performed considerably worse than the other variations, there were no combinations which clearly performed better than the others. This research does however give a small opportunity to further investigate the attention attracting factor, as this showed a small positive effect. This factor proved to be insignificant in this research, but when researched in more detail, this might lead to useful results in future research. Marketers should however be careful when using common sense when designing the ad message; the dynamics of SEA seem not always as straightforward as one might expect. In this study evidence is found for ad types which perform much worse and should not be used. It also shows that there is a lot of research needed to fully grasp the dynamics of SEA and that traditional theories on advertising do not necessarily apply on SEA. A step in the right direction is taken in this thesis; more knowledge about ad performance in SEA is uncovered.
