AKEGIS: automatic keyword generation for sponsored search advertising in online retailing

Abstract Sponsored search advertisers face several complex decisions when planning and implementing a new sponsored search advertising campaign. These decisions include the selection of keywords, the definition of landing pages, and the formulation of bidding strategies. Relatively low attention has been paid on supporting the selection of keywords in recent research and most studies on sponsored search advertising focus on the formulation of bidding strategies and strategies for budget planning. We present a novel approach for automatically generating sponsored search keywords that relies on the theory of consumer search behavior. Our approach uses an online store's internal search log to extract keywords used by consumers within their search process, because recent research has shown that especially consumers with a high conversion probability that exhibit goal-directed instead of exploratory search patterns use an online store's internal search engine. We empirically test our approach based on a store's internal search engine and identify the effects of this approach by comparing it to a state-of-the-art approach. Our analysis reveals that our approach substantially increased the number of profitable keywords, improved the store's conversion rate by approximately 41%, and decreased the average cost per click by more than 70%.