Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
5
Understanding Consumer Behavior for
Sponsored Search
Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has
taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products
which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same
field, the results have been disastrous
.
David Ogilvy
,
Confessions of an Advertising Man
[
1
, p. 156] and
Ogilvy on Advertising
[
2
].
Credited with revolutionizing modern advertising.
Advertising is perceived by some as a manipulative form of communication.
However, successful practitioners in the advertising field have commented that
advertising can be amazingly unsuccessful if the product does not resonate with the
customer, which the quote from Ogilvy illustrates [
1
].
Our framing business Web site is up and running and the start of a sponsored-search
effort is underway as part of our overall advertising endeavors to attract customers.
What types of customers are most likely to be interested in getting a picture
framed? What is their motivation for visiting the Web site of a framing shop? Are they
looking to get a picture framed for themselves? Or a picture framed for their moth-
ers? Their spouses? Their friends? Each of these different motivations will influence
a customer's behavior, mood, and expectation out of the experience and exchange.
These different expectations will influence how we advertise to the customer. The
moods will affect what advertisement copy works on them.
Of course, there are the more practical questions of how the potential customer
finds the Web site and what strategy the customer employs for both query formulation
and selection of a navigation strategy. Does the consumer start at a general-purpose
search engine, a social networking site, a niche search engine, or one of several other
possibilities? What terms does the searcher select for the query? What price does this
potential customer have in mind?
Naturally, these questions have some relationship to our understanding of the link-
age between keyphrases, query terms, and the evaluation of individual advertisements.
However, you must also focus on the searcher, specifically in regards to consumer
strategy and tactics. The consumer strategies and tactics are based on human infor-
mation behavior and processing, which we have discussed in earlier chapters on key-
words (Chapter 3) and advertisements (Chapter 4).
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