Subjective or objective: How the style of text in computational advertising influences consumer behaviors?

Abstract

In the era of computational advertising, advertising effectiveness can be measured by different metrics at different stages of the sales funnel. In the upper funnel, the click-through rate (CTR, the rate of click per impression) represents the attractiveness of the advertising; the conversion rate (CVR, the rate of conversion per click) in the lower funnel indicates the persuasiveness of the advertising. Achieving higher CTR and CVR may need distinct advertising strategies: improving CTR requires raising more consumers' interest in the ad, which is more beneficial to publishers; boosting CVR needs the ad to inspire more consumers' desire in the product (service), which is more profitable to advertisers. In order to study the performance of advertising texts in terms of the two dimensions and reconcile the two different goals, this paper draws on Speech act theory (SAT) in linguistics to classify advertising texts into three types (i.e., assertive, expressive, and directive), and analyzes how advertising texts can impact consumer behaviors. We further categorize the above three styles of advertising texts into subjective type (i.e., expressive and directive) and objective type (i.e., assertive). Based on a field study, we find that subjective advertising with more personalization leads to a higher CTR, while objective advertising with higher consistency with the brand information results in a higher CVR. The results suggest that firms with different marketing goals should utilize different styles of advertising texts to elicit desirable consumer behaviors during different stages of the sales funnel.