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We study the bidding strategies of vertically differentiated firms that bid for sponsored search advertisement positions for a keyword at a search engine. We explicitly model how consumers navigate and click on sponsored links based on their knowledge and beliefs about firm qualities. Our model yields several interesting insights; a main counterintuitive result we focus on is the \"position paradox.\" The paradox is that a superior firm may bid lower than an inferior firm and obtain a position below it, yet it still obtains more clicks than the inferior firm. Under a pay-per-impression mechanism, the inferior firm wants to be at the top where more consumers click on its link, whereas the superior firm is better off by placing its link at a lower position because it pays a smaller advertising fee, but some consumers will still reach it in search of the higher-quality firm. Under a pay-per-click mechanism, the inferior firm has an even stronger incentive to be at the top because now it only has to pay for the consumers who do not know the firms' reputations and, therefore, can bid more aggressively. Interestingly, as the quality premium for the superior firm increases, and/or if more consumers know the identity of the superior firm, the incentive for the inferior firm to be at the top may increase. Contrary to conventional belief, we find that the search engine may have the incentive to overweight the inferior firm's bid and strategically create the position paradox to increase overall clicks by consumers. To validate our model, we analyze a data set from a popular Korean search engine firm and find that (i) a large proportion of auction outcomes in the data show the position paradox, and (ii) sharp predictions from our model are validated in the data.

Advertisement in dedicated webpage spaces or in search engines sponsored slots is usually sold using auctions, with a payment rule that is either per impression or per click. But advertisers can be both sensitive to being viewed (brand awareness effect) and being clicked (conversion into sales). In this paper, we generalize the auction mechanism by including both pricing components: the advertisers are charged when their ad is displayed, and pay an additional price if the ad is clicked. Applying the results for Vickrey–Clarke–Groves auctions, we show how to compute payments to ensure incentive compatibility from advertisers as well as maximize the total value extracted from the advertisement slot(s). We provide tight upper bounds for the loss of efficiency due to applying only pay-per-click (or pay-per-view) pricing instead of our scheme. Those bounds depend on the joint distribution of advertisement visibility and population likelihood to click on ads, and can help identify situations where our mechanism yields significant improvements. We also describe how the commonly used generalized second price auction can be extended to this context.

In this research, we evaluate the effectiveness of the buying funnel as a model for understanding consumer interaction with keyword advertising campaigns on web search engines. We analyze data of nearly 7 million records from a 33 month, $56 million (US) search engine marketing campaign of a major US retailer. We classify key phrases used in this campaign into stages of the buying funnel (i.e., Awareness, Research, Decision, and Purchase) and then compare the consumer behaviors associated with each stage of the buying funnel using the critical keyword advertising metrics of impressions, clicks, cost-per-click, sales revenue, orders, and items sold. Findings from our analysis show that the stages from the buying funnel are effective for classifying types of queries, with statistically different consumer behaviors for all attributes among all stages. However, results also indicate that the buying funnel model does not represent the actual process that consumer engage in when contemplating a potential purchase, as the stages do not seem to be associated with expected consumer actions as predicted by the model. Results show that Awareness key phrases cost less and generate more sales revenue than Purchase queries, indicating that these broader phases can be a lucrative advertising segment for sponsored search campaigns. The results reported in this paper are important to researchers interested in understanding online consumers interaction with search engines and beneficial to search engine marketers striving to design successful advertising campaigns. Insights from this research could produce keyword advertising efforts being more effectively targeted to consumers in order to achieve campaign goals. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

In this article, we study a balancing problem of web publishers for pay-per-view and pay-per-click contracts for online display advertising. Considering the details of contracts, we refine prior research results on the recommendation of optimal strategies. We examine the problem by formalizing a simple stochastic optimization problem for a single period of advertising contracts. We investigate how pricing and other contract components will affect the optimal display strategies analytically and numerically.