Advertisers should avoid a “one-size-fits-all strategy” for paid search, and instead leverage different approaches for smartphones, tablets and desktop, according to a study in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).

Chongyu Lu (Pace University) and Rex Yuxing Du (University of Houston) discussed this subject in a paper entitled, Click-through behavior across devices in paid search advertising: Why users favor top paid search ads and are sensitive to ad position change.

The study drew on Google AdWords data for 13 advertisers in various industries and covered over 20 million ad impressions in total.

Based on this data, the authors looked at a variety of factors, including if smartphone, tablet and desktop users behave differently when it comes to clicking on the top paid-search ads or when the position of ads change.

Paid search advertisers, they argued, “should bear in mind that there can be significant device effects on the click-through rate; instead of a one-size-fits-all strategy, they should make device-specific adjustments to their paid search campaigns.”

One finding in support of this claim was that for “unbranded searches, the clickthrough rate for the top paid search advertisement was, on average, the highest on tablets, followed by smartphones, and the lowest on desktops.”

For branded queries, in contrast, there was “no significant difference between smartphones and desktops with respect to the clickthrough rate for the top advertisement for branded queries.”

Additionally, “the clickthrough rate for the top paid search advertisement was, on average, higher on tablets than on smartphones or desktops.”

Smartphone and tablet users were also found to be “more sensitive than desktop users to advertisement position change” meaning that ads that moved away from the top saw greater clickthrough declines on these devices.

The implication is that advertisers using paid search may want to consider paying “a higher top-position premium” on smartphones where unbranded queries are concerned.

Drilling down into tablet behaviour, the analysis revealed that clickthrough habits on tablets was “more similar to smartphones than desktops” – albeit tablets users logged higher clicks on the top search ad than smartphone users.

Given such datapoints, and the fact that tablets account for a significant share of online search – over 18% of the sample in the study – the authors had a recommendation for marketers.

Advertisers using paid search, they asserted, should “resist the temptation of expediency to group tablets with either smartphones or desktops. Rather, they should consider optimizing their paid search advertising campaigns for each device type.”

Sourced from Journal of Advertising Research; additional content by WARC staff

Sourced from Journal of Advertising Research; additional content by WARC staff