A Large-Scale Field Experiment to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Paid Search Advertising
Lorenz Goette,
Lorenzo Coviello and
Uri Gneezy
No 12333, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers
Abstract:
Companies spend billions of dollars online for paid links to branded search terms. Measuring the effectiveness of this marketing spending is hard. Blake, Nosko and Tadelis (2015) ran an experiment with eBay, showing that when the company suspended paid search, most of the traffic still ended up on its website. Can findings from one of the largest companies in the world be generalized? We conducted a similar experiment with Edmunds.com, arguably a more representative company, and found starkly different results. More than half of the paid traffic is lost when we shut off paid-links search. These results suggest money spent on search-engine marketing may be more effective than previously documented
Keywords: Search-engine marketing; Field experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)
Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12333 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org
Related works:
Working Paper: A Large-Scale Field Experiment to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Paid Search Advertising (2017) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12333
Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12333
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().