A Systematic Review on Search Engine Advertising

Abstract

The innovation of Search Engine Advertising (SEA) was first introduced in 1998. It soon became a very popular tool among practitioners for promoting their websites on the Web and turned into a billion dollar revenue source for search engines. In parallel with its rapid growth in use, SEA attracted the attention of academic researchers resulting in a large number of publications on the topic of SEA. However, no comprehensive review of this accumulated body of knowledge is currently available. This shortcoming has motivated us to conduct a systematic review of SEA literature. Herewith, we searched for and collected 101 papers on the topic of SEA, published in 72 journals from different disciplines and analyzed them to answer the research questions for this study. We have identified the historical development of SEA literature, predominant journals in the publication of SEA research, active reference disciplines as well as the main researchers in the field of SEA. Moreover, we have classified SEA literature into four categories and 10 research topics. We also uncovered a number of gaps in SEA literature and provided future research direction accordingly.

Conversion potential: a metric for evaluating search engine advertising performance

“…Responding to the need for research about the lack of conceptualizations of SEA performance and combined metrics, as well as operationalization problems (Jafarzadeh et al, 2015;Katsikeas et al, 2016;King et al, 2015), this research bridges a gap between theory and practice, as one of the few academic works that presents not only theoretical constructs but validates them with actual advertising data. As a major contribution to the academic literature, our study formalizes Brooks' (2004aBrooks' ( , 2004b concept of Conversion Potential (CvP) for the evaluation and management of SEA campaigns, being one of the few research studies that contributes to the SEA metrics literature.…”

“…A growing body of academic research reports on various aspects of SEA, such as: keyword performance for newly established campaigns (Abou Nabout, 2015), intrinsic and extrinsic keyword characteristics (Klapdor et al, 2014), optimal ad pricing (Sen et al, 2008), personalization of client-side keyword profiles (Bilenko and Richardson, 2011), effects of search result design (Edelman and Lai, 2016), the impact of multiple search ad exposure on consumer intent to purchase (Fulgoni and Mörn, 2008); relationships between keywords (Rutz et al, 2012); generic versus branded search (Rutz and Bucklin, 2011), search engine marketing efficacy (Blake et al, 2015), and click behaviors (Jerath et al, 2014). Jafarzadeh et al's. (2015) review of 101 papers from 72 journals classified the SEA literature into four streams of research (e.g., law-related, overview/review, mechanisms, and behavioral/practical) and ten topical areas such as bidding strategy, keyword selection, click fraud, and searcher behavior, to name a few.…”

“…The Role of Ad Rank in SEA SEA relies on the concept of optimization which includes all of the strategies and tactics that one might use to improve performance. There are numerous studies contributing to our understanding of optimization such as bidding strategies, ad quality, keyword characteristics, keyword frequency, brand mentions, calls-to-action, and ad extensions (c.f., Jafarzadeh et al, 2015;Klapdor et al, 2014). We assume that optimization factors can be ordered or grouped in some manner, giving them a ranking.…”

“…Search engine advertising (SEA) serves as a central revenue stream for major search engines (Jafarzadeh et al , 2015), such as Baidu, Google, Yandex and Bing. Known as keyword advertising, search engine marketing and pay-per-click, SEA shaped the nature of the web (Laffey, 2007) and is a critical marketing component for many organizations (Quinton and Khan, 2009).…”

“…Although the search engine marketing field is trending in the academic literature (Pomirleanu et al , 2013), limited research exists on the theoretical conceptualization of SEA performance (Jafarzadeh et al , 2015), and performance measurement problems seem to be commonplace in marketing. In their analysis of nearly 1,000 studies, Katsikeas et al (2016) uncovered problems with both the operationalization and conceptualization of marketing performance outcomes.…”