Study by auction website says billions spent by advertisers on keywords to maximise Google ranking has little effect on sales
Spend on search advertising in the UK alone is worth about £3bn a year, with Google accounting for around 90% of that. Google made close to $37bn from advertising in the US in 2011, said the report.
"Results show that brand keyword ads [where companies purchase ads on searches for their own name] have no short-term benefits, and that returns from all other keywords are a fraction of conventional estimates," said the authors of the research.
The 25-page report – given the not entirely search-friendly title of Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment – found that most customers would have clicked through to a particular site without being prompted by an ad for the company.
