Journal of Interactive Advertising

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Search Engine Advertisement Design Effects on

Click-Through Rates

Geoffrey Atkinson, Carl Driesener & David Corkindale

To cite this article: Geoffrey Atkinson, Carl Driesener & David Corkindale (2014) Search Engine
Advertisement Design Effects on Click-Through Rates, Journal of Interactive Advertising, 14:1,
24-30, DOI: 10.1080/15252019.2014.890394

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Journal of Interactive Advertising, 14(1), 24–30
Copyright C 2014, American Academy of Advertising
ISSN: print / 1525-2019 online
DOI: 10.1080/15252019.2014.890394
Search Engine Advertisement Design Effects
on Click-Through Rates
Geoffrey Atkinson, Carl Driesener, and David Corkindale
University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia
This article reports the relationship that specific elements of
search engine advertisements (SEAs) have with click-through rates
(CTRs) within Google AdWord Campaigns. In total, 1,880 separate
advertisements with more than 57 million impressions and 185,000
click-throughs were analyzed. The main finding is that some el-
ements have both positive and negative relationships with CTRs
depending on where they are placed within the advertisement. An
implication is that the section of the advertisement in which an
element appears should be taken into consideration when devising
SEAs and when evaluating the relationship between elements and
CTRs. We found the elements with mostly a positive effect on CTRs
were brand, value “puffery,” and price; and those with a negative
effect were promotions and questions. Limitations of the study and
future research opportunities are given.
Keywords click-through rate (CTR), design elements, ad creative,
search engine, advertisement
Small, four-line advertisements are often placed on the pe-
riphery of the organic results pages for a search engine inquiry.
This paid search engine advertisement (SEA) activity was pre-
dicted (Goodwin 2012) to have grown worldwide by 27% in
2012 to $19.5 billion, which represents some 44% of all pre-
dicted online advertising expenditure, the other main display
advertising activity being banner advertisements. In Australia,
for example, the total online advertising expenditure is now
greater than that for newspapers and almost equal to that for
free-to-air TV (IAB and PWC 2013). Chandon, Chtourou, and
Fortin (2003) contend that much advertising on the Internet is
a form of direct marketing, likening it to consumers’ response
to coupons in print media or offers received via direct mail,
Address correspondence to David Corkindale, University of South
Australia, City West, North Terrace, Adelaide, South Australia 5000,
Australia. E-mail: david.corkindale@unisa.edu.au
Geoffrey Atkinson (BA, Honours, University of South Australia)
research associate, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science,
University of South Australia Business School.
Carl Driesener (PhD, University of South Australia), senior research
associate, Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, University
of South Australia Business School.
David Corkindale (PhD, Cranfield), professor of marketing, Uni-
versity of South Australia Business School.
24
and that the success should be measured through the relevant
return rate, the click-through-rate (CTR). However, academic
research into how the elements of SEAs affect the CTR is still
in its infancy (Rutz and Trusov 2011). The findings of our study
are based on SEAs for one company in the automotive retail in-
dustry in Australia. Our findings contribute to both the general
understanding of the possible effects of elements present within
advertisements and also provide managers in the SEA industry
with a method for determining the effectiveness of SEAs on
CTRs from their accumulated data.
The specific elements we studied for their impact on
CTRs were selected from the limited research literature on
SEAs, claims and generalizations in industry publications, and
Google’s recommendations. They can be set out under four
broad headings: brand related, calls to action, marketing ap-
peals, and punctuation. In this study, brand can be broken down
into company, which was a car retailer brand; the manufacturer,
which was the manufacturer of the car; and the product, which
is the model of the car brand. Marketing appeals included the
following elements: keyword, choice (e.g., range offered), price,
promotions, and value puffery. Punctuation was represented by
use of exclamation points and use of capitalization.
We provide an overview of what is generally known or rec-
ommended about the effectiveness of such elements as the four
just noted before outlining the data and method of analysis used
in our study, which is to explore the effects of each element on
CTRs.
A SELECTIVE LITERATURE REVIEW
A relatively recent study on the relationship between the
SEA content and commercial outcome was based on the ring-
tone sales industry (Rutz and Trusov 2011). Rutz and Trusov’s
(2011) investigation examined the ways of collecting, coding,
and analyzing available data. Their analysis focused on the ef-
fects on CTRs in three categories of elements in SEAs: the
attractiveness of the headline, the creation of “conviction or
desire,” and calls to action.
They found that calls to action and the use of the search key-
word in the title or headline have a positive effect on CTRs. They
also had indications that the price of an item in an advertisement
 SEARCH ENGINE AD DESIGN EFFECTS
had some influence on where in the ranking the advertisement
appeared, that is, how high it is positioned from top to bottom
along the side of the results page. In the electronic appendix to
their article, Rutz and Trusov (2011) also recommend the use of
attention-grabbing content, such as promotions, discounts, and
“rewards for reading.” The broad elements in our study taken
from Rutz and Trusov’s work are calls to action, promotions,
price, use of questions, and use of keywords.
The use of questions in the headline for SEAs was studied
by Turnbull and Bright (2008), who observed that including a
question in the ad headline generally was associated with under-
performing CTRs. A separate study conducted on the branding
effects of keywords noted that advertisements with the best per-
forming CTRs had both the same brand name used in the key-
word as present in the advertisement (Jansen, Sobel, and Zhang
2011). Based on these two studies we included the following
elements in our study: use of questions, use of keywords, and
mention of brands.
Industry publications also suggested factors in SEAs that can
influence CTRs, but the claims made for their effectiveness were
rarely backed by evidence. To benefit from industry experience
we included some elements most often cited in industry publi-
cations as being influential on CTRs: punctuation used in the
headline and other lines, value puffery, and the offer of a choice.
Google, an authority on sponsored-search research, provides
advice on “creating successful advertisements” (Google 2012).
We have included the following elements from this advice in our
study: highlight the business’s unique features; include prices,
promotions, and exclusives; give a call to action; include key-
words; use strong brands; and use punctuation (such as title
case).
Other studies on content in SEAs provide comparisons
among differing content tactics. The effects of positive and neg-
ative framing of proposals have been examined, with positive
framing being beneficial in low-involvement purchases (Yoo
2011). A comparison between commercial (value offers) and
descriptive (product features) found that descriptive content per-
formed best, although price-sensitive readers do not discrimi-
nate between the two; likewise, quality-based ads outperformed
price-based ads (Animesh, Viswantathan, and Agarwal 2011;
Gauzente and Roy 2012). Finally, argument types have been
compared that investigated the effect of expert advice, statisti-
cal evidence, and causal evidence, finding that expert advice and
statistical evidence create greater CTRs (Haans, Raassens, and
van Hout 2013). This is not an exhaustive list of all elements
that could be included in our study, and this is discussed in the
Limitations section.
In SEAs, it is assumed that the audience to whom an adver-
tisement is exposed is a relevant one as a result of the search
term (keyword) that a searcher has used. What the advertiser
has to offer and what the search engine actually displays is a
result of the interplay of these two factors. Including the key-
word in an advertisement is, therefore, likely to be an important
influence on CTRs and should be one of the elements in our
25
study. The overall profitability of an SEA campaign will be a
major criterion for identifying a successful advertisement and
factors such as the conversion rate of those who do click an
advertisement, and the cost of buying the keyword for it are
part of this overall evaluation (Nabout and Skiera 2012). The
strategy that advertisers should follow when bidding for access
to search terms is a specific area of online advertising research
(see, for example, Baye, Gao, and Morgan 2011; Yao and Mela
2011; Zhang and Feng 2011) and beyond the scope of our study.
However, the necessary first step in assessing the overall success
of an advertisement is its achievement of an initial response, the
CTR. The elements used in the advertisement and their location
in it and how these influence the initial response, the CTR, is
what our study examines.
The position that an advertisement attains on the search re-
sults page has been found to influence CTR (Agarwal, Hosana-
gar, and Smith 2008; Animesh, Viswantathan, and Agarwal
2011; Bar-Ilan, Mat-Hassan, and Levene 2006; Rutz and Trusov
2011). Google actually uses past CTR performance in its calcu-
lation of how much to charge an advertiser for a given position,
or rank, on the results page. As such, it was planned in our study
to control for the rank that advertisements achieved, but in the
initial analysis of our particular data set we found very little
correlation between position, or rank, and CTRs, and so this
was excluded from our subsequent investigation.
Following is the list of elements we examined for their re-
lationship with CTRs. To help with the understanding of the
meaning of these elements, we give an illustration or elabora-
tion of each:
• Call to Action: Advertisement asks the consumer to do
something. Examples: “Enquire Today!” and “Come
compare the prices now!”
• Price: Advertisement includes a specific price. Exam-
ple: “$24,990”
• Choice: Gives the consumer more than one option.
Examples: “Select from our wide range of vehicles”;
“Large range available”
• Keyword: Advertisement includes the exact search
keyword used by the searcher.
• Promotion: Advertisement includes a specific offer.
Examples: “Purchase online today to receive $100 cash
back”; “Sale ends soon!”
• Value puffery: Advertisement makes an unspecified
claim to value. Example: “Great price on cars!”
• Punctuation: Advertisement uses forms of punctua-
tion to attract attention, including excessive capitaliza-
tion of words within a headline and/or text. Example:
“Get a Great Deal on Toyota”
METHODOLOGY
The research aim was to look for the quantitative relation-
ships between elements used in SEAs and the CTRs associated
with them. Data for this were supplied to us by a company that
26 G. ATKINSON ET AL.

TABLE 1 vestigating. The advertisements were examined for the presence

How the Advertisements Were Categorized
CTR category No. of ads CTR range (%)
High 628 0.56−7.64
Medium 633 0.15−0.55
Low 619 0.00−0.14
Note. CTR = click-through rate.
manages the search advertising campaigns for a range of large
companies in Australia. We were given the data on the CTRs
for 2,494 advertisements, with more than 57 million impressions
and 185,000 clicks, by an automotive retailer in a city in Aus-
tralia shown to searchers on Google via a personal computer for
automotive-related keywords during the period January 2008
through July 2012.
All advertisements that received no clicks were removed, as
were all ads that appeared less than 25 times, as these would not
represent mainstream search ads and could potentially produce
outliers in the data. This reduced the number of advertisements
for our analysis to 1,880. The CTR for the purpose of our anal-
yses was derived from the following for each advertisement:
CTR = (Total Clicks by Consumers/Total Impressions) × 100
We subsequently observed that, across our set of advertisements,
the distribution of values of CTRs was very positively skewed
and not normally distributed. For subsequent analysis purposes
the CTRs were categorized into equal thirds: high, medium, and
low bands, as shown in Table 1, and this became the dependent,
categorical variable in our analyses.
We needed to code each advertisement for the presence, or
absence, of the elements in the advertisements that we were in-
of these elements in each of their four sections: title, description
line 1, description line 2, uniform resource locator (URL), and
a fifth measure, “appeared at all.” The latter measure captured
whether any of the four advertising elements we are studying
appeared at least once somewhere in the advertisement.
The elements were also coded for which section of the ad-
vertisement they occurred in, for example, the heading or line
2. We did not include examination of the effect of the presence
of the URL, as we found it was very highly correlated with
the presence of the company brand name. Our data included
the keyword associated with each advertisement only when it
was “automatically inserted” (i.e., where the ad copy is scripted
to include the keyword used in the search). More than 50,000
keywords were present in the data set’s campaign, however, and
coding all of these into meaningful categorizations would be
extremely difficult. More important, it was impossible to link
the ad content with the keyword used, as it would not be known
which keyword an ad had appeared with; thus pairing the con-
tent with the keyword was also not possible. Consequently, we
were unable to identify the influence the keyword may have had
on CTRs in our market category.
Table 2 shows the frequencies of occurrence for the elements
examined in our study and in which section of the advertisement
they appeared; where data are not present there were no exam-
ples in the data set for that section. For instance, price was never
mentioned in an advertisement heading or title. The percentage
figures refer to the percentage of advertisements that contained
the element in a position, for example, price was mentioned 228
times in body line 2 of 12% of all the advertisements that we
examined.
As described, we coded each advertisement for the elements
it contained and the sections of the ad in which they were lo-
cated. Three coders were used: a coordinator/instructor and two

TABLE 2
Frequency and Location of the Advertising Elements
Appeared at all In heading In body line 1 In body line 2
Ad element n % n % n % n %
Price 238 13 0 0 10 1 228 12
Product brand 1,309 70 1,235 66 436 23 335 18
Manufacturer brand 1,147 61 1,019 58 354 19 277 15
Value puffery 1,051 56 16 1 745 40 306 16
Call to action 1,198 64 0 0 57 3 1,141 61
Keyword 799 43 799 43 0 0 0 0
Choice 521 28 0 0 369 20 152 8
Exclamation 1,382 74 0 0 11 1 1,371 73
Company brand 471 25 34 2 247 13 190 10
Title case 1,730 92 744 40 1,268 67 1,570 84
Promotion 334 18 41 2 153 8 140 7
Question 168 9 142 8 26 1 0 0
 SEARCH ENGINE AD DESIGN EFFECTS 27

TABLE 3 a low CTR response, 40 with a medium level of CTR, and 58

Capitalization of Words in the Title Line, or Not, and CTR with a high response. Consequently, from the data in the table
Level we see that the use of uppercase letters or capitalization of title
or headline does not appear to be associated with CTR.
CTR Level Next, in order to determine if an element like capitalization
Title capitalization Low Medium High Total is associated with a higher CTR, odds ratios were calculated
to indicate the likelihood of a given ad content eliciting greater
Not present 52 40 58 150 CTRs. For example, the title case in a particular line location was
Present 567 593 570 1,730 calculated as being more or less likely to be associated with high
Total 619 633 628 1,880 or low CTR. The greater the number above 1, the stronger the
Note. CTR = click-through rate. relationship. An example of this is calculated as follows (using
Table 3 as reference): Low CTR is calculated as having odds of
10.9 of occurring (567 present/52 not present); high CTR has
research assistants. The coordinator coded the entire data set, odds of 9.8 of occurring (570 present/58 not present). We note
and the research assistants each coded half of the data set. The that categories vary only very slightly in size. Comparing high to
intercoder reliability was tested, and any inconsistencies found low, we find 0.9 odds of title case to be in high CTR rather than
were reassessed by the coordinator. The elements were coded low CTR (9.8/10.9); title case, when present is 1.1 (10.9/9.8)
as either being present (coded 1) in each line of the ad or not times more likely to be in low CTR rather than high CTR. This
present (coded 0). These dummy variables were created for the means that when title case is used, it has a negative influence on
eight elements in our study. The most common form of punctu- CTR. However, this relationship was not statistically significant,
ation device that was used was that of capitalization; therefore, as the data showed little variation. In our results these odds will
its presence or absence was observed and coded to represent the always be presented as either a negative or positive relationship
punctuation element. with CTR. “Positive” in this context means being more likely to
be associated with high CTR, and “negative” means a likelihood
of being associated with a low CTR.
ANALYSIS METHOD
The data were analyzed initially using cross tabulation in
SPSS to identify the elements that appeared to be significantly FINDINGS
related to CTRs. This was then used as the basis of an odds ra- Table 4 gives a summary of the study’s results where scores
tios analysis. An example of the odds ratio analysis is presented ranged from −7.6 for call to actions in line 1 to +2.8 for price
in Table 3 for the examination of the effect of the headline/title in line 2. For each of the elements that may occur in an adver-
being in uppercase or lowercase. First, we can see that for 150 tisement, which are listed in the first column at left, we first
advertisements, no part of the title/headline contained an upper- show the strength of the relationship with CTR depending on
case letter; 52 that had no uppercase letter were associated with the locations of where it may occur in the advertisement, which

TABLE 4
The Strength and Nature of Relationship Between Ad Elements by Location
Title Description line 1 Description line 2 Total
Ad element Strength Relationship Strength Relationship Strength Relationship Strength Relationship
Price 1.0 Negative 2.8 Positive∗∗∗ 2.7 Positive∗∗∗
∗∗∗
Product brand 2.0 Positive 1.7 Positive∗∗∗ 1.4 Positive∗∗ 1.7 Positive∗∗∗
Manufacturer brand 1.9 Positive∗∗∗ 1.5 Positive∗ 1.7 Positive∗∗∗ 1.7 Positive∗∗∗
Value puffery 1.1 Positive∗ 1.0 Negative 1.6 Positive∗ 1.3 Positive∗
Call to action 7.6 Negative∗∗∗ 1.6 Positive∗∗∗ 1.3 Positive
Keyword 1.1 Positive
Choice 1.4 Positive 1.8 Negative∗∗ 1.0 Positive
Exclamation 1.1 Positive 2.6 Negative 1.0 Neutral 1.0 Negative
Company brand 1.6 Negative 1.5 Positive 1.8 Negative∗∗ 1.1 Negative
Capitalization 1.3 Negative 1.2 Positive∗∗ 1.2 Negative 1.1. Negative
Promotion 3.6 Negative∗∗ 1.3 Negative 1.8 Negative∗∗ 1.8 Negative∗∗∗
Question 4.1 Negative∗∗∗ 1.9 Negative 3.7 Negative∗∗∗
∗
p = 0.05; ∗∗ p = 0.01; ∗∗∗ p = 0.001.
28 G. ATKINSON ET AL.
are listed in the column headings across the table. For example,
mention of price in an advertisement’s title line did not occur
in any of our sample advertisements, and so no strength of re-
lationship of price to CTR is cited for that location; it is left
blank. Mention of price when it is in line 1 of an advertisement
was associated with a low CTR (the very low odds ratio value
of 1.0), meaning it had a negative effect, but this was not signif-
icant and so is presented in a grayed-out typeface. The number
of asterisks in the table uses the usual convention to show the
statistical significance.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The following sections provide an overview of each adver-
tising element’s relationship with CTR as found in this study.
Punctuation: Title Case
The use of uppercase letters for words in an advertisement
is recommended by Google as it is thought to attract the eye of
the consumer. In our study, we found that not only was it the
most-used device but it seemed to be mostly associated with
a nonsignificant, though negative, effect on CTR except when
used in line 1 of an advertisement.
Brand
In prior research, product brand has been found to increase
CTR when used as a keyword by the searcher (Ghose and Yang
2010; Jansen, Sobel, and Zhang 2011) and when it is a famil-
iar brand (Dahlen 2001). Its use in banner advertisements has
been suggested to depress CTR (Chandon, Chtourou, and Fortin
2003), but in our study we found it to be a positive influence
regardless of where it appeared in the advertisement. This may
well be because it provides both the benefits of branding and
usually assists to identify what the company is offering.
We found that the manufacturer brand has a positive influence
wherever it is used. In the case of the automotive industry,
product and manufacturer are usually well known and branded
and so the positive association with CTR is not unexpected. This
could be for similar reasons as product brand: it helps the reader
identify what they are looking for.
In our data the company brand was the retailer’s brand, which
was found to have a negative effect if used in most positions in an
advertisement; this was opposite of the effect of the other types
of branding cited. However, the URL almost always contained
the company brand name, so presence elsewhere in an adver-
tisement would essentially be duplication. We did find that URL
use in line 1 seemed to be positive, though not significantly.
These findings represent an important extension of the previ-
ously identified benefits of branding, as it shows the effect can
occur for both the product brand name and the manufacturer’s
brand name.
Call to Action
Call to action has been found to be slightly positively related
to CTR (Rutz and Trusov 2011) and is also one of Google’s
recommendations. In our study it was found to have a positive
influence when used in line 2 of an advertisement, but it had
a very strong negative influence if used in line 1. A possible
explanation is that a call to action would be more appropriate
at the end of an advertisement when all the other reasons for
a consumer being interested in the offer have been presented.
However, the sample of advertisements upon which the finding
for this element was derived was relatively small, so the finding
is tentative.
Value Puffery
The use of value puffery has generally been recommended in
industry publications, and Google recommends including spe-
cific product benefits and/or specific reasons why the consumer
should buy an advertised item. In our study we found that the
nonspecific promise of a “deal” was mostly positive—except in
line 1, where it had a negative effect, though not significantly.
Choice
Choice has been recommended by trade publications as a
way of increasing CTRs. It was not used at all in the title or
heading of any of our sample of advertisements and was rarely
used in line 2. When appearing in line 1, it had a positive effect
on CTRs; thus it appears to be a useful tactic.
Promotion
Promotion was found to be a negative influence in our study.
This contradicts advice by Google, which encourages the use of
“offers.” However, research on the use of “cash promotions” in
banner advertisements has found that it has no effect on CTR
(Baltas 2003), and this somewhat corroborates our finding.
Price
Including pricing, on the other hand, had the most positive
effect on CTR of the elements we examined, particularly when
used in line 2 of advertisements. The inclusion of price has been
found to be positive in other SEA studies (e.g., Rutz and Trusov
2011); in addition, Google (2012) recommends including price.
These findings are opposite of those for banner advertisements,
where mention of price can reduce CTR (Chtourou, Chandon,
and Zollinger 2002) and absence of price can have a positive
effect on CTR (Rettie, Grandcolas, and McNeil 2004).
Questions
In previous research, the recommendation regarding posing
questions in SEAs was to avoid its use (Turnbull and Bright
2008). Our study confirms this finding, as the use of a question
had a negative effect on CTRs regardless of placement. In other
media (such as press and TV), advertisements that start with a
question are quite common, as they are believed to attract atten-
tion and identify problems viewers may have that the advertiser
wants to solve. It is possible that the use of questions is not
effective in SEAs as consumers are using search engines to look
for answers, not more questions.
 SEARCH ENGINE AD DESIGN EFFECTS
Main Finding
Our main finding is that all of the elements we examined in
SEAs can have an influence on CTR response level, but their
impact can be dependent on the line of the advertisement in
which they appear.
From our findings we can formulate an ideal advertisement
for the automotive retail industry. It would include the “identi-
fication brands” of the product and the manufacturer in the title
(1), a boasting of the range on offer in line 1 (3), and a combina-
tion of value puffery, call to action, and price in line 2 (4) with
the retail (landing page’s) brand in the URL (2). An example of
an ideal advertisement is provided:
1 New Toyota Camry
2 www.CarRetailerBrand.com.au
3 A Huge Range Of Camrys Available
4 Get A Great Deal Now! Only $28,990
LIMITATIONS
Our study and its findings are based on the SEAs of one com-
pany, in one market, and in one country; also, one person created
most of the advertisements in one digital advertising agency, and
the advertisements had a high level of repetition over the several
years for which we had data. The data are for advertisements
that were presented for searches done on personal computers.
In Australia, 79% of CTRs for SEAs were on personal comput-
ers in 2012 rather than on mobiles (Marin Software 2013). We
were not able to take into account the possible effects on CTRs
of brand size and reputation, competitive advertising activity
and their ad’s ranking position on the page, or the full impact
of the use of search keywords. These considerations limit the
generalizability of our findings but indicate the areas of further
research to be able to more fully explain and predict CTRs for
particular SEAs. Our finding— that the position in which an ad-
vertising element is used may well influence the degree of CTR
achieved—can alert future researchers in this area to include
this consideration in their work.
Many elements could be used in SEAs, and we examined the
effects of just some of them. Further suggestions of elements
that can influence CTRs made by SEA practitioners are person-
ification and positive/negative tone, but these were not included
in our study as they would have been difficult to code consis-
tently. We would also expect that additional elements may be
found in other market categories. We note differences between
some of our findings and those in the study by Rutz and Trusov’s
(2011) in the mobile ringtones category; for example, the use of
product brands is prevalent in SEAs for automobiles but rare in
those for mobile ringtones.
FURTHER RESEARCH
Our exploratory study investigates only whether an element
was present or not in SEAs at a basic level. Many elements
can be broken down into more specific levels. For example,
the wording used to create a call to action can be widely var-
29
ied. Other finer details that could be explored are variations in
presenting price—for example, whether the price was “expen-
sive” or “cheap” compared to other advertisements. For brand,
it would be valuable to explore whether the size of a brand has
an effect on the ad’s association with higher CTRs. There is,
hence, the opportunity for more focused studies to investigate
this element’s association with CTRs. Furthermore, our study
did not investigate the possible interactive effects of elements
in SEAs; for example, it could be that the effects of price and
branding are enhanced when both appear together, but the de-
gree of enhancement may vary depending on where in the ad
each is located. This is a needed area for future research.
There are various advertising theories or principles that could
help explain the results of our study. The following outlines
how future studies might expand on the preliminary results of
this study by utilizing such theories and associated appropriate
methodologies.
In our results it was found that a call to action performs best
in line 2. While we did not investigate why this is the case, it is
possible that the hierarchical process AIDA (attention, interest,
desire, action) could help explain such a gap in our knowledge
through carefully designed experimental research where ads are
tested using different sequences of elements. In addition, we
could explore further questions in the same way; for example,
does the use of branding in the title and in early sections of an
ad result in positive CTRs due to readers preferring an AIDA
format for ads?
Further studies might also examine what has been found to
stimulate response in other advertising media. For example, the
likability of an ad has been found to be associated with subse-
quent sales response in the Advertising Research Foundation’s
Copy Research Validation Project (Haley and Baldinger 1991).
Respondents in an SEA research study could be asked what as-
pects of the text had aided in them liking the ad, which could then
be compared with CTR results to establish whether likability is
positively associated with CTR.
Finally, research could investigate whether there is any con-
nection between findings from structural patterns in text, such as
Gutenberg’s Z (Lidwell, Holden, and Butler 2003), and CTRs.
Such studies could reveal how the location of content is more
effective in one section of an advertisement than another section.
The effectiveness of the title and bolded keywords in attracting
attention could be examined via typographical hierarchy stud-
ies where theory suggests certain types of content draws readers
into the next sections of the text.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank and acknowledge Frank Grasso,
CEO, and the staff of e-channel Search (e-channel.com.au) for
their provision of data access for this research.
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