Does Search Matter? : Using Online Click Stream Data to Examine the Relationship between Online Search and Purchase Behavior

DOES SEARCH MATTER? : USING ONLINE CLICK STREAM DATA TO EXAMINE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ONLINE SEARCH AND PURCHASE BEHAVIOR Neveen F. Awad, Joni L. Jones, Jian Zhang Introduction The ability to track consumer behavior online is considered a prime advantage that online retailing has over brick and mortar retailers. However, firms are still grappling with how to understand their consumers through click steam data. Initially, firms were concerned with visit volume, conjecturing that by increasing the number of visitors, firm revenue would also increase. In fact, visit measures continue to be among the most widely used and cited online metric (Demers and Lev 2001). However, visit measures clearly do not tell the full story (Moe and Fader 2004). Thus practitioners and researchers alike are presented with an important issue, namely firms are collecting myriads of click stream data online, but they do not know what the data is telling them about the relationship between consumer search and purchase behavior. Thus, in this study, we explore the relationship between search behavior and purchase behavior at two different levels of analysis; specifically, we examine search breadth and search depth in association with purchase behavior in the extended and session-level contexts. Prior literature has examined inter-firm search analytically (Bakos 1997), in relation to posted price (Brynjolfsson and Smith 2000), in an experimental setting (Lynch and Ariely 2000), and in relation to individual tendency to search over time (Johnson, Moe et al. 2004). In this study, we extend this prior research by examining the relationship of online search behavior to online purchase behavior across sites. Our goal is assess whether a relationship between search and purchase behavior exists, and how that relationship appears different at different levels of analysis.