The Effect of Linguistic Matching on Consumer Response to Search Advertising

Abstract

How do task-oriented search engine users recognize ads as goal-relevant when they are only lightly scanning the search results? An overlap between consumers’ query language and ad text was found to be the most important predictor of ad click-through in this situation, and the second most important otherwise. Advertisers are advised to be sensitive to task orientation and have separate ads for high and low, particularly mirroring consumers’ words in high task situations rather than relying on their own lexicon. Short term memory already populated with query words is quicker to recognize relevance when the ad uses the same words.

Keywords: search advertising

JEL Classification: M37