An Eyetracking Study on Human Categorization : Analyzing the Basic Level Advantage in Online Advertising

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2009 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1.0, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: (...)Due to the importance of Search Engine Marketing, the following research paper is concerned with online advertising on search sites. Advertisements displayed on search engine websites consist of text only and are triggered via keywords. This means that online advertisers choose keywords which determine when to show their advertisement. Of course, it is not solely the selected keywords which determine if the ad is displayed or not. There are other important factors, such as the quality of the website and the budget the advertiser is willing to spend. However, on the whole, the keywords and the ad text are highly important in keyword-based Online Advertising. This points to the fact that the success of an online advertisement is mainly determined by language and the Internet user's interaction with language. If there are words which are more likely to be used as search terms by Internet users, then online advertisers should include these words in their ad text and their keyword list rather than other words. The better the keywords and ad text match the user's search term, the higher the probability that the ad will be displayed and the better the ad performance.This paper aims to give an answer to the question of which words are preferably used by Internet users when they place a search query. Concluding from this, the thesis intends to provide advertisers with recommendations for keywords that ensure a successful ad performance. In order to deal with this issue, the linguistic theory of the basic level concept will be applied to keyword- based Online Advertising. According to the basic level advantage, basic level words carry the most information, are most distinctive and are preferably used in speaking (cf. Rosch et al. 1976).