14 March 2013
Dr Philip Alford, director of the Digital Hub at Bournemouth University, spoke about whether keyword advertising on search engines is effective in an article on the BBC Technology website.
Companies can pay to have keyword advertising, which means that their website appears more prominently when a person searches for a particular term related to them.
But a recent eBay study found that most people who visited their site as a result of keyword advertising would have done so anyway.
Dr Alford, a senior lecturer in Tourism and Hospitality Marketing at BU, said that eBay was an established brand and that keyword advertising may be more useful for smaller companies.
"eBay has become a household brand name, they already have a highly engaged user base," said Dr Alford, adding that many people would search for the website directly.
"With Google ad words, particularly for smaller organisations, it can make a lot of sense because for some of them, their websites aren't at a stage yet where they have been sufficiently indexed by Google, so they struggle to come up in natural searches for terms."
You can read the full article here
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