Brand engagement on social media: will firms’ social media efforts influence search engine advertising effectiveness?

ABSTRACT

Although firms leverage social media platforms such as Facebook to engage with customers, they often treat social media elements and other online marketing activities such as search engine advertising as stand-alone, rather than part of an integrated online activities system. Hence, it is important to systematically understand how specific elements of social media, signifying and representing behavioural manifestations of brand engagement, relate to other online activities. We study how three types of brand engagement on social media – affiliation, conversation and responsiveness – influence search engine advertising effectiveness, including click-through rate and conversion rate. Specifically, we find that affiliation, conversation and responsiveness increase click-through rate and conversion rate. Moreover, brand engagement on social media strengthens the relationships between advertisement rank and search engine advertising effectiveness.

KEYWORDS:

• Brand engagement on social media
• search engine advertising
• social media
• advertising effectiveness
• advertisement rank

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The CMO Survey was compiled by Christine Moorman of Duke University, McKinsey & Co. and the American Marketing Association (AMA). The sample consisted of 351 top marketers from leading organisations in the United States reached through Duke University’s alumni network and the AMA’s membership.

2. Note: In this article, the lower the rank (1–10), the higher the position in the search results. For example, an advertisement rank of 1 means that the advertisement is displayed at the top of the search listing.

3. Socialbakers (http://www.socialbakers.com) is one of Facebook’s preferred marketing developers. It has been awarded three Preferred Marketing Developer badges (Pages, Apps and Insights) from Facebook.

4. One-year historical Google data is sufficient to examine the search engine advertising performance. For example, Ghose and Yang (2009)’s search engine advertising data contain advertising on Google from a large nationwide retail chain during a period of six months in 2007. Rutz and Bucklin (2011)’s data include search engine advertising for a major lodging chain from both Google (from 1 March 2004 to 20 December 2004) and Yahoo! (from 6 May 2004 to 31 August 2004). Rutz and Trusov (2011) use a search engine advertising dataset from the ringtone industry over 20 days in 2007.

5. Technically, conversation data were obtained from individual users’ own Facebook page whose posts or sharing related to the apparel brand, while responsiveness data were obtained from the apparel brand’s Facebook brand page. Thus, each data point was used for a single element.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [grant number 71172036].