In this research, we examine the pivotal effects of search volume on technology firms’ financial performance and add incremental knowledge on the importance of online search data. We use panel data with ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis covering a fixed period to provide insights into the impact of the volume of online search queries of the top five U.S. technology firms’ brand names and products on their financial performance. Through a longitudinal study of the five most prominent technology firms in the United States, this research provides evidence that online search volume of a firm’s brand names is negatively related to firms’ performance (return on equity (ROE), return on assets (ROA), and Tobin’s Q), while search volume for a firm’s major products’ names is positively associated with ROE and ROA. Informed by accessibility-diagnosticity theory and construal level theory, we believe our findings hold because the negativity effect of online information is more saliently activated by higher-level construals (e.g., corporate brand information) than lower-level construals (e.g., product information). The findings provide new insights on search engine data interpretation. The theoretical and managerial contributions of these results are also discussed.
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Liu et al. (2021) studied this question.