This is the last in a series of posts inspired by sessions and conversations at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose.
A conference like last week's provides rich pickings and I hope you found coverage of the Search Industry Update, Semantic Search and Measuring Online Success presentations plus my Theatrical Analytics thoughts helpful reading.
The last write up is about the Searcher Behaviour Research panel.
Our very own research manager Pavan Lee was on hand with some fascinating insight into how users interact with what she called "The Power Of Three!"
One of my favourite pieces of research from years gone by that I quote often is from Yahoo! and Isobar and called Fluid Lives.
Amongst many other statistics on how we consume media in this more and more fragmented and device-driven world, Fluid Lives says that 51% of us admit to regularly surfing the Internet while watching TV. This kind of evidence helps to persuade advertisers that not only do they have to think of multiple channels when planning their campaigns - TV, mobile, print, search and display - but that that campaign plan must have all these channels synchronised to make the most of the potential brand-lift associated with different channels exposed to the same user over a short period of time.
Pavan's presentation was all about Cross Channel Effectiveness.
Working with some pretty big brands like HP, Starwood Hotels and Office Depot we ran search, display and contextual ad campaigns to see how user would react to just one ad format, exposed to two ads or shown all three types over a period of time.
The results showed a lift in ad recall, brand recall, message recall and a rise in purchase intent if search ads were used together in conjunction with content ads. When display advertising was added to the mix the recollection and purchase intent jumped even further.
Pavan's very powerful "take away" was that having all three formats in the mix coordinated effectively meant a synergistic brand impact for the company buying the ads.
Other great information came from Bill Barnes from Enquiro who showed us some research on the branding effect of paid and unpaid search campaigns.
The fact that you can increase brand association by 16% if the top search ad and the top organic listing are from the same brand goes along way to enhance what some search marketers believe is an important strategy.
Very often advertisers who are well optimised for generic words in organic traffic don't see the point in paying for advertising on top of that well ranked phrase But Bill's research obviously suggests that if you can afford it and you are measuring the ROI accurately enough, it could be worth your while to secure "two bites of the cherry" and have two listings for your company - one in the PPC listings and the one in the organic SERPS as it could have a positive effect for your brand.
The main theme I took from the session was that the more touch points or channels you can provide your potential customers to interact with, the more likely they'll remember you and hopefully purchase your goods and services.