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Display Ads Boost Sales and Searches
by Meredith Stack in Media on Jul 09, 2009
The Online Publishers Association (OPA) is on a mission to demonstrate the value of online advertising and encourage advertisers to look beyond the click as the primary metric of success. I applaud their efforts, as I am guilty of falling back on the click rate to measure success despite the fact that I know that the click rate is only one piece of the puzzle and can vary greatly based on the creative and the message.
In association with comScore, OPA released a study showing that display advertising is effective in driving engagement and online spending. They monitored 80 branding campaigns across 200 of the most trafficked websites.
They tracked users who saw the branding ads for one month and measured three things:
- Searches conducted for the related brands
- Visits to the brand’s website
- E-commerce transactions
Here is what they found (and this is just measured online behavior):
- One in five conducted searches
- One in three visited the website
- When they visited the website, they spent 50% more time on the site and consumed more pages
- They spent 10% more money when they made e-commerce purchases
These are very encouraging statistics that help combat the befuddlement advertisers feel when one of every 1,000 people who saw their ads clicked on them. But to all the advertisers that were not part of the study, the learnings are just a case study, a distant statistic. With more accountable forms of media available, we need to make these learnings more personal if we don’t want display advertising to be abandoned. It falls on the media planners’ and agencies’ shoulders to show their clients measurable results.
At the on-set of every campaign, metrics of success must be discussed. Clients and agencies need to put their heads together to pinpoint what actions can be tracked. We need to take the time on the front end to implement more sophisticated tracking so we can adequately convey the impact of campaigns.
On a final and whiney note, may I close by saying, “Life isn’t fair!” Why aren’t traditional media buys held to the same standards of measurement? If only I had to report on the fact that the media I purchased ran, my life would be much simpler - but not nearly as analytical!
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I think traditional media buys will have to increase accountability to remain relevant.
Response methods such as; PURLs, SMS shortcodes and smart goal conversion are finally combining the “prestige factor” of print with the power & tracking ability of the web to prove ROI of a campaign.
Great post!
Online Marketing has 2 problems affecting metrics, Location and Motion. Most people are seeing and clicking on web ads from their computers not their cell phones. So they are either in the house or at work sitting down.
This means it’s going to take one very good offer for someone to get up and go buy something at a store 30 miles away.
Without an online store this becomes a major problem.
The best marketing campaigns on the web lead to some type of really big fun event at a store. These type of campaigns can be measured easily as site and store traffic will increase significantly and it’s pretty obvious if an event is a success or a failure.
Until the mobile web becomes as fast and as easy to use as the web on computers, online marketing will continue to have the problems of location and motion.
Well I agree that the Display adds boost sales, but my personal experience with my friend circle is, they prefer not to click the add banner as it may execute some sort of spyware or malicious code.
Meredith - THANK you for your post. I’ve read articles that commented on that same OPA study—but appreciate the way that you shared the salient points in a concise way.
I agree that we can do a better job of setting up measuring sticks in ADVANCE of an online display campaign // and I’ve also found that briefing my clients on what to EXPECT is helpful too (so many of them have done search-engine-marketing and are spoiled to the instant gratification of a PPC model - that it’s important to remind them to compare their DISPLAY ad campaign to their other “top of the funnel” marketing efforts—like cable, or radio, print or billboards.)
And to respond to “cisco exams” - online ad designers are wise to consumers’ aversion to click an ad—so the best practices of today use rich media and expandables to provide more information without requiring the click.