• Adweek, Monday, August 20, 2007 11:45 AM

Paying for high ad placement on search engines could be a waste of money, since many consumers are planning to visit those Web sites anyway.

New research by Microsoft suggests a big chunk of search ad spending is wasted because advertisers pay top dollar for high ad placements clicked by consumers already en route to their sites. Listings tied to such "branded" keywords, typically a company's name or products, eat up about half of search budgets.

Atlas, formerly part of aQuantive and now a unit of Microsoft, studied 30 search ad campaigns reaching 120,000 users on Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. It found that nearly half of clicks on ads came from people who had already visited the advertiser's Web site. Moreover, about 60 percent of visits came from "branded" words, like the company's name, while just 29 percent were from people who searched for generic terms and had never been to the advertiser's Web site -- the type of new customers search is meant to attract.

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