Consumer Search Activities and the Value of Ad Positions in Sponsored Search Advertising
Consumer Search Activities and the Value of Ad Positions in Sponsored Search Advertising
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DOI：
10.1287/mksc.2015.0903
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发表时间：
2015-07-01
影响因子：
5
通讯作者：
Park, Young-Hoon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Chan, Tat Y.;Park, Young-Hoon
消费者搜索活动可以由赞助搜索广告中的广告位置内生地确定。我们模拟广告商如何在赞助商列表中竞争广告位置，并以赞助商广告列表为条件，在线消费者如何搜索信息并做出购买决策。在消费者方面，假设用户自上而下浏览信息，并采用顺序搜索策略，我们开发了一个两阶段的消费者搜索模型（是否点击和是否停止搜索），扩展了经济学文献中的标准顺序搜索框架。在广告商方面，很难完全确定广告商的最佳策略，因为均衡结果取决于研究人员没有观察到的变量。由于我们有一个不完整的广告客户竞争模型，我们建议使用的必要条件，在均衡，没有广告客户会发现另一个可用的广告位置比它选择的更有价值。使用从搜索引擎获得的数据集，我们发现，消费者可以分为两个部分，表现出不同的搜索行为。对于广告主来说，搜索广告的价值主要来自终端点击，即在线用户点击的最后一个链接（包括有机结果）。我们还表明，广告位置的价值不仅取决于赞助商列表中的广告客户的身份和位置，而且还表现出不同的搜索行为的在线消费者的组成。
Consumer search activities can be endogenously determined by the ad positions in sponsored search advertising. We model how advertisers compete for ad positions in sponsored listings and, conditional on the list of sponsored ads, how online consumers search for information and make purchase decisions. On the consumer side, assuming that users browse information from top to bottom and adopt a sequential search strategy, we develop a two-stage model of consumer search (whether to click and whether to stop the search) that extends the standard sequential search framework in economics literature. On the advertiser side, it is very difficult to fully specify the optimal strategies of advertisers because the equilibrium outcome depends on variables that researchers do not observe. As we have an incomplete model of advertiser competition, we propose using the necessary condition that, at equilibrium, no advertiser will find another available ad position more valuable than the one it has chosen. Using a data set obtained from a search engine, we find that consumers can be classified into two segments that exhibit distinct search behaviors. For advertisers, the value of search advertising comes primarily from terminal clicks, which represent the last link (including organic results) clicked by an online user. We also demonstrate that the value of ad positions depends not only on the identities and positions of the advertisers in sponsored listings but also the composition of online consumers who exhibit distinct search behaviors.