Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Therefore, people develop ways to filter or attend to the information that is important
to them at some given time and in some given context, and mentally ignore the other
information that is not deemed important.
Signal and scent in sponsored-search advertisements
This leads us, of course, to the question, what is a good signal in a sponsored-search
advertisement?
Naturally, this is difficult to answer in all situations, for all searchers, and for all
products or services. However, empirical research has highlighted some practical
implications of signal and scent.
Branded content
A mountain of empirical research illustrates that a wide variety of searchers consider
branded terms in the advertisement a good signal or scent [
17
,
18
]. This is true even
if the searcher's query does not contain a branded term. If the advertisement con-
tains a branded term that is related to the industry vertical or product, it statistically
increases the probability that the searcher will attend to the advertisement. However,
depending on the company, the reaction may be either positive or negative. For more
on this, see Chapter 6 on branding.
What is a branded term?
A branded term is a term that refers to a specific company, or product, or service
by a company with which the consumer associates an image, concept, feeling, or rep-
utation. So, for our frame shop, it could be the name of the business,
Faster Frames
.
Query content
Perhaps there is no better signal or clue than the actual query term that the searcher
submitted to the search engine. This has been shown to dramatically get the searcher
to attend to the ad [
19
,
20
].
Search engines have pursued various forms of additionally highlighting and facili-
tating the use of query terms in the advertisement, such as bolding terms in the adver-
tisement that are also in the query and techniques to dynamically insert the query
term or terms into the advertisement.
Action, location, price, and quality terms
Certain product terms seem to be good signals for searchers, although these are
somewhat more difficult to implement than brand or query term signals. However,
the payoff can be quite good.
These product terms are known collectively as action, location, price and quality
(ALPQ) terms:
•
Action
terms that direct the searcher to make the transition from searcher to con-
sumer seem to be good signals. These are typically known as “call to action”
terms in the search engine marketing field.
•
Location
terms are those that tie the advertised product or service to a spe-
cific geographical location. This is an especially important signal for small- to
