Weekend effect in internet search advertising

This paper examines whether Internet search advertising exhibits a weekend effect, a substantial difference in the effectiveness of ad spending on weekends vs on weekdays. We employ a data set from a major hotel chain, consisting of daily spending on search ads for 13 months, across three search engines and two brands. We find that there is a strong weekend effect. Each dollar of ad spending on weekends delivers a lower sales return than the corresponding return on weekdays. The advertising elasticity (percentage change in sales for a percentage change in ad spending) is about 3:7% lower on weekends, which translates to a 10% reduction in sales return at the mean level of daily spending. The weekend effect is robust across the 6 combinations of search engines and brands. We show that the reduction in advertising elasticity is primarily attributable to an increase in the price of clicks on weekends rather than due to any differences in conversion rate of click-throughs to sales. Further, we find that the weekend effect is exacerbated for ad spending at the top-ranked paid search listings. Awareness of the weekend effect can help managers fine-tune the distribution of their advertising budget across time, and achieve greater sales returns from a given ad budget.