How to select search keywords for online advertising depending on consumer involvement: An empirical investigation

In paid search advertising on Internet, advertisers bid for specific keywords. Consumer involvement affects a consumer’s purchase intention. However, there has been no research on selecting keywords in paid search advertising depending on consumer involvement from the advertisers’ perspective. Our paper investigates the effects of several factors including impressions, click-through rate, conversion rate, the number of competitors and the quantity of online customer reviews on the performance of individual keywords. Our analysis shows that regardless of consumer involvement, the conversion rate and the number of reviews significantly affect to the performance of individual keywords but the click-through rate does not. In addition, the effects of impressions and the number of competitors partially exist depending on consumer involvement. This study provides managerial insights into paid search advertising and can give some assumptions in the theoretical modeling literature for allocating advertising budgets.

► Effectiveness of keyword advertising could be different depending on product involvement.
► Impressions might be positively related to ad efficiency for high-involvement products.
► The keyword ad efficiency improves with the number of reviews.