6. In detail, everything, including no pricing informa-
tion at all (x
2B1
), seems to be be better than advertising
”no deposit” (x
2B2
). The next best text feature in terms
of pricing is to give an exact value for the percentage
that a user can save on the advertiser’s website (x
2B3
).
This feature is performing credibly better than those
mentioned above. What is the best way to communi-
cate pricing in Paid Search Ads - given the data - is
to provide exact pricing information from the adver-
tiser’s database (x
2B4
). In fact it is credibly superior to
any other feature in terms of pricing communication,
given the observed data.
4 CONCLUSIONS AND
OUTLOOK
What we applied in this paper offers a valid way to
evaluate text features and other nominal predictive
variables where tests are an essential part of the daily
business. In terms of substantive issues it is the hard
facts that the potential customers are looking for when
they research in a search engine. The more spe-
cific information on pricing is provided in an ad
- the better is the chance of winning the customers
click. Building up trust is one good feature for an ad-
vertiser to support this effect or even substitute parts
of this positive effect if they do not have competi-
tive prices or special rebates available. In this spe-
cific case this has been achieved by communicating
the existence of a credible trust seal in the ad-copy.
What we did not asses in this research but would find
interesting for an ongoing investigation is the ques-
tion whether these findings have additional impact on
the conversion probability on the advertiser’s landing-
page as well. Applying Bayesian ANOVA to mul-
tivariate tests in Online Advertising, especially Paid
Search Advertising, has various advantages compared
to applying conventional Analysis of Variance. This
is especially true for unbalanced data like the present
one. One obvious limitation to the results is that they
should probably only be true for advertisers with com-
petitive prices. Additionally this test should be re-
peated for a number of other advertisers from various
industries to answer the question whether these obser-
vations can be generalized.
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