Attention: A Better Way to Measure
SEO Marketing Impact

Abstract

Empirical studies find that marketing efforts can reduce the offer price discount in SEO by attracting more investors’ attention. However, existing measures of investors’ attention are all indirect. This article contributes to the field of SEO marketing the first direct attention measure, the user search frequency index from Google Insight for Search (GIS). We find that a one-point increase in pre-issue GIS index indicates about 3% reduction in offer price discount. More importantly, this effect is not weakened after including all previously found indirect measures, confirming the uniqueness of this direct measure. Last but not least, significant differences between IPO and SEO suggest that this measure works more effectively for SEO.