Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected online advertising market. The pandemic has changed customers’ shopping behavior by decreasing customer traffic in offline businesses but increasing customers’ online activities that has led to growth of online shopping and advertising. While the outbreak of Covid-19 has sparked growth of online advertising in general, its impact on various industries may not be the same, given the differences in product characteristics and consumer behavior across different products and services. This paper aims to address this question by empirically examining how Covid-19 has affected online search advertising market. First, we examine how Covid-19 has affected the behavior of online users and advertisers, the main stakeholders in the search advertising market, in terms of user traffic and clicks and advertiser bids and payments. Second, we examine if the impacts of Covid-19 on behavior of online users and advertisers would be different in various industries.

Paid search advertising is the most popular online advertising format, and many large firms allocate a considerable amount of their advertising budget to it. In contrast, small and medium-sized firms have a limited advertising budget that potentially forces them to experience the ineffectiveness of paid search advertising. In this study, we identify the various paid search advertising strategies that even small and medium-sized firms can implement and examine the effect of the different advertising strategies on the number of clicks as a primary advertising performance measure. Using the data regarding keyword advertising from a search engine, we find that advertisers can increase the number of clicks not only by increasing their bids, but also by optimal keyword selection, targeting, and active advertisement management. Our findings provide a practical insight that there are many other advertising strategies for the managers to utilize beyond budget efficiently.

Online search advertising (aka, sponsored or paid search advertising) is a technology that any matched advertisement is displayed on Web pages as online users’ query results from search engines and Web portals (e.g., Google, Bing, Baidu, Naver, and Yahoo!). In specific, after online users type search keywords on the search box (at this stage, online users become searchers), search engines match users’ query texts to phrases included in search advertisement. Then, if an advertiser’s investment on her/his search advertisement is high enough, the advertisement is likely to be displayed on a search engine results (called “impression”) (Hanson and Kalyanam 2007; Jansen et al. 2009; Jansen and Clark 2017; Moore, Stammerjohan, and Coulter 2005). Once a searcher clicks a displayed advertisement and arrives on the advertiser’s landing page, s/he becomes a visitor by clicking the impression. As benefits of utilizing search keywords, online search advertising can reduce search costs and increase information accessibility by potential customers. In addition, because online search advertising provides relevant search results based on the users’ own queries, it is considered less intrusive than banner advertisement and widely used by many marketers (Ghose and Yang 2009; Johnson, Bruner, and Kumar 2006; Quinton and Khan 2009; Rangaswamy, Giles, and Seres 2009; Yang and Ghose 2010).

Sponsored search advertising is the largest form of the Internet advertising in terms of advertising expenditure. Although researchers have studied various issues in the sponsored search advertising, they have mainly focused on managing each keyword separately without considering the relationship between different keyword queries. However, this is not consistent with the industry practice, and fails to account for the consumers’ search patterns. Online retailers carry various brands and products from competing manufacturers and their advertising strategy needs to include multiple keywords consistent to their product line. Similarly, consumers sequentially search and click on a number of different keywords at different stages of their decision journey. While it is important to understand advertisers’ bidding strategy and consumers’ search behavior in an integrated manner, the previous research in marketing has less explored the interplay between advertisers bids and consumer searches in a multiple keyword setting. We address these issues and offer practical implications on how advertisers should optimally and simultaneously bid on multiple keywords, incorporating consumers click behavior on multiple keywords. This study empirically examines the relationships between consumers’ clicks and online retailers’ bidding strategy on multiple keywords of competing manufacturer brands of 242 retailers. Our data contain daily information of the most popular keywords in a running shoes category on different search advertising metrics. Based on the consumer decision journey and purchase funnel framework, we classify the keywords into different groups following a hierarchical structure of the generic, brands, and models levels and examine the relationships between different keyword groups. Our main findings show that consumers usually click on multiple keywords of each manufacturer brand in a manner consistent with the consumer decision journey or purchase funnel framework, and that consumers are less likely to click on keywords across competing brands. However, online retailers’ bidding pattern is different from consumers’ click behavior in that they simultaneously bid on multiple keywords of competing manufacturer brands at the different hierarchy levels. In sum, our results provide online retailers useful insights to improve their keyword management practice, based on the relationship we identified on the consumer clicks and advertiser bids.

Search advertising, the paid listings on a search engine website based on consumers’ keyword searches, has become one of the most important advertising formats and have thus received a huge amount of attention from both academics and practitioners. While many researchers have studied search advertising in a single keyword framework, in practice, consumers’ search usually involve multiple keywords related to their purchase, and similarly, firms advertise on a set of related keywords. Thus, understanding a utilization of multiple keywords is important for firms to efficiently allocate their advertising budget to each keyword, based on consumers’ decision of which keywords to search and which advertising to click. Therefore, this study aims to examine consumers’ search behavior in terms of their click decisions and retailers’ bidding strategy over a set of related multiple keywords. We empirically examine the aforementioned issues regarding consumer clicks and advertiser bids in a search advertising campaign. We use in our empirical analysis a unique dataset containing a number of related keywords in a running shoes product category, in which consumers frequently make online purchases, pertaining to two leading brands in the product category, Nike and Adidas. Based on the consumer purchase funnel framework, we have classified the keywords into five keyword groups at three different levels, the category, brand, and model level keywords. Our data contain daily information from 242 online retailers on their search advertising metrics such as payments per clicks, bids, quality scores, ranks, and the number of clicks from September 1, 2012 to November 30, 2012. Our empirical findings show that overall, consumers search for keywords in a manner consistent with purchase funnel, although some inconsistencies exist in the detailed behavior, depending on different keyword groups and brands. Our findings also show that retailers simultaneously bid on multiple keywords at different stages of the consumer purchase funnel, suggesting that retailers regard the different keywords as strategic complements. However, our findings suggest that retailers’ allocation of their bids across multiple keywords are often inconsistent with the consumer search behavior. Those findings provide advertisers with new insights on multiple keyword management to develop and implement a more effective search advertising strategy.

Search query information has been neglected in the evaluation and management of search engine advertising. Based on a search engine advertising campaign for a 4 year period, this study explores if search advertising metrics vary for informational, transactional, and navigational search intentions. Differences across these intentions were found for the advertising rank, click-through rate, cost per click, offline signing rate, and cost per contract. As a result, the study proposes the integration of search intention in search engine advertising management by incorporating the available search query information. This notion of keywords as a composition of different search intentions challenges the current practice of evaluating search engine advertising on a one-dimensional keyword basis.

미국 시장의 경우 모바일 브로드밴드 환경의 확대와 스마트폰 및 웹 스토어 보급 확산으로 모바일 광고시장은 새로운 도약의 전기를 맞이하고 있다. 모바일 광고시장이 모바일 LBS(Local Based Service)와 모바일 SNS(Social Network Service)등의 성장동인(Driving Force)에 힘입어 본격적인 성장국면에 돌입하고 있는 상황이다. 모바일 광고형식은 한국에서도 상용화 단계에 접어들고 있다. Yahoo와 Google을 비롯한 많은 검색엔진과 포털들이 모바일 기반 광고시장의 본격적인 출발을 준비하고 있다. 이런 점에서 모바일 디지털 매체의 재정원이라 할 수 있는 모바일 광고 시장이 앞으로 어떤 추세로 발전할 것인지를 전망해보고 한국 매체시장의 조건과 결합될 때 어떤 문제점이 나타날 것인지에 대해 살펴보는 것은 그 의미가 크다고 할 수 있다. 본 연구에서는 이러한 문제인식을 바탕으로 한국 내 모바일 광고시장의 현황 및 특징을 살펴보고 향후 발전방향 및 주요 쟁점에 대해 살펴보았다. 그리고 검색광고 시장 내 갈등과 문제점을 해결하기 위한 정책적 필요성을 제시하였다.

In this paper, I undertake the study of click fraud by Cases Analysis and Law Analysis. Click fraud is a type of fraud that occurs on the Internet search advertising in pay-per-click (PPC) when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad. PPC advertising is an arrangement in which operators of websites display links from advertisers in exchange for a charge per click. Competitors of advertisers may wish to harm a competitor who advertises in the same market by clicking on their ads. Click-fraud perpetrators essentially pile up and burn their competitors’ marketing budgets in the one place they can attack them. The perpetrators do not profit directly but force the advertiser to pay for irrelevant clicks, thus weakening or eliminating a source of competition. Using a computer to commit click fraud is a felony. According to the Act on promotion of information and communications network utilization and information protection, etc in Korea, No one shall cause a trouble to an information and communications network purposely to interfere with stable operation of the information and communications network by sending a large amount of signals or data, letting the network process an illegitimate order, etc. Also according to the criminal act, Any person who interferes with another person’s business by damaging or destroying any data processor, such as computer, or special media records, such as electromagnetic records, or inputting false information or improper order into the data processor, or making any impediment in processing any data by other way, shall also be subject to the same punishment as referred to in paragraph. In this paper, I have described the concept; ‘letting the network process an illegitimate order’ and inputting false information or improper order.