How Display Advertising Improves Performance of Search

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Several studies have been done on how online display advertising improves the performance of both organic search (gets people searching for your brand and/or condition), as well as paid search or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) efforts. Performance on both goes up dramatically when online display is part of your online marketing efforts.

Users exposed to both search and display convert at an even higher rate – 22 percent better than search alone…Clearly, even in the presence of search there is good reason to supplement users with display advertising – an idea that has been overlooked as online advertising dollars have increasingly gone towards search.

View the Atlas report, “Where can you find your customer: The Intersection of Search and Display”

Comscore and the Online Publisher’s Association (OPA) also did a collaborative study on 80 different campaigns representing 53 brands to measure the impact that online display advertising has on trademark searches, traffic to a site and ecommerce transactions. Key points from the study include:

Users exposed to display spend upto 55% more time on the brand site when they arrive and view up to 51% more pages than those not exposed to display
Depending on the advertising category, users exposed to online display advertising spent between 9-149% more on ecommerce purchases than those not exposed to display
One in five people exposed to online display conducted related searches for the brand; One in three visited the brand site (but not necessarily through the display ad)

Comscore OPA “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online”

Atlas also measured the impact of display overlap, whereby you reach the same users (perhaps unintentionally) with your display ads because the media plan includes several different publisher sites or online advertising networks. In short, this type of overlap is actually very good. Your highest converters are typically those who you’ve reached through multiple online channels, not just a single channel. However, according to the Atlas “Overlap Matters” study, “Overlap drives up frequency without the advertiser being aware of it. So, dropping buys with high overlap and reallocating the dollars towards publishers with superior exclusive reach is an easy first step to increase efficiency. Look for publishers that do a good job exclusively reaching converters”.

View the Atlas Overlap Matters Study