Paid search for online travel agencies: Exploring strategies for search keywords

Sponsored search is a large and growing advertising channel for online retailers. Although advertisers appreciate that search engines can serve ads triggered by particular search terms that only need to be paid for when the ad delivers a potential customer, we suspect that many advertisers are not capturing all the benefits of paid search because they do not have a clear picture of what they are trying to accomplish. In order to help advertisers improve their search spend, we provide an overview of Google's adWords, which is the dominant paid search program, and describe the fundamental metrics of paid search and their relationships with one another. We identify three different goals an advertiser might have for a particular keyword: traffic growth, profit and a hybrid approach we term self-funding. Finally, we provide recommendations for how to treat some broad categories of keywords.