Post Purchase Search Engine Marketing

Although consumer behavior in response to search engine marketing has been studied extensively, few efforts have been made to understand how consumers search and respond to ads post purchase. Advertising to existing customers the same way as to prospective customers inevitably leads to wasteful and inefficient marketing. Employing a unique dataset that combines both search query and purchase data, we examine consumers' searching behavior and response to search engine marketing after purchase. We study large advertising campaigns for two popular technology products. We find that over half of the branded keyword searches come from consumers who already purchased the products, and that advertising response varies based on whether searchers are pre- or post-purchase. In general, post-purchase searchers are less likely to click on focal brand ads (i.e., they are less responsive to ads for products they already own). However, post-purchase searchers are still responsive to advertising and much more likely to click on ads for complementary products (i.e., they are more responsive to ads for relevant products other than the focal product).