Weekend effect in internet search advertising

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Publication Type Journal Article
School or College David Eccles School of Business
Department Accounting & Information Systems
Creator Ramachandran, Vandana
Other Author Hemant, Bhargava
Title Weekend effect in internet search advertising
Date 2012-01-01
Description 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.
Type Text
Publisher University of Utah
First Page 1
Last Page 31
Dissertation Institution University of Utah
Language eng
Bibliographic Citation Hemant, B., & Ramachandran, V. (2012). Weekend effect in internet search advertising. Working paper, David Eccles School of Business, 1-31.
Rights Management (c)University of Utah
Format Medium application/pdf
Format Extent 557,297 bytes
Identifier uspace,16990
ARK ark:/87278/s6h710hp
Setname ir_uspace
ID 707575
Reference URL https://collections.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6h710hp
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