A report by auction website eBay has found that paying for advertising in the form of keywords on search engines has little effect on sales.

Platforms such as Google and Bing offer companies the option to “buy” words.

This means their websites appear more prominently if a person searches for a particular term.

The eBay study found that most people who clicked through as a result of this service were loyal customers who would have come to the site anyway.

Don’t know why eBay needed to arrange for a report to be undertaken to confirm this, as many people have moaned at the high cost of paying for keywords vs the poor returns.