Does advertising catalyse information seeking online? A time series analysis of the impact of advertising volume on Google search volume

Many empirical studies have been done in the past to test the cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral impacts of commercial message on consumers. But very few studies have been conducted to explore the online information seeking due to advertising exposure. Given the fact that the spread of the mobile internet makes consumer information seeking more convenient than ever, testing this ignored aspect becomes practically valuable and theoretically important. Using advertising expenditure and google search query time series data from 2011-2016 on a hundred brand names across multiple product and service categories, this study attempts to relate television, print, and internet ads to aggregate market-level information seeking tendency. Despite the declining of traditional ads market, the results suggest that print advertising is most effective in soliciting further information seeking on the internet.