Remember the old adage from John Wannamaker? “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half?”
Looking at Comscore’s recent analysis of the click-through and impact of internet display advertising, it turns out Wannamaker might have been overstating the productivity of his advertising.
This week, Comscore released an update to the “Natural Born Clickers” research that it conducted two years ago. That survey showed that 32% of Internet users clicked on web display ads.
Guess what? The number has gone down, precipitously. Comscore’s update shows that only 16% of internet users clicked on a display ad in March 2009. Only 8% of all users account for 85% of all clicks.
Don’t judge display advertising by the number of click-throughs, though, Comscore argues.
“A click means nothing, earns no revenue and creates no brand equity. Your online advertising has some goal – and it’s certainly not to generate clicks,” said Starcom USA SVP/Director, Research & Analytics John Lowell. “You want people to visit your website, seek more information, purchase a product, become a lead, keep your brand top of mind, learn something new, feel differently – the list goes on. Regardless of whether the consumer clicked on an ad or not, the key is to determine how that ad unit influenced them to think, feel or do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise.”
This June in the Journal of Advertising Research, Comscore shared data that showed advertisers experience a 46% lift in business activity following a month of web display advertising.
Three empirical generalisations are proposed: 1) even with low click rate, display ads can generate substantial lift in site visitation, trademark queries and online plus offline sales; 2) search ads are more effective than display ads, but the higher reach of display ads means that they can generate larger sales increases overall; 3) synergy with search advertising produces higher effects than either type of advertising separately.
The premise of total advertising transparency in a digital age is clearly flawed. Marketing succeeds from a combination of product positioning and brand awareness; sales are driven when brand awareness and product needs are closely aligned with distribution channels.
One way of thinking about your marketing mix is to consider search marketing to be like in-store merchandising. When a consumer comes to Google to search for product, they are already in the store and in a buying frame of mind. You can influence them at the point of purchase with a commercial offer.
But you can also drive that consumer directly to your own distribution channel and not give up any margin to third-parties. Comscore argues that by using display advertising on the web, a brand can significantly increase its business activity.
Of course, other media does that as well….like magazines, and radio and TV. The ultimate decision about which media to use should be driven by the cost of customer acquisition across all channels and incorporating all media expense.
That’s not a popular concept. But it’s the core of marketing effectiveness.
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