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There’s a lot of buzz at the moment about the idea of online campaigns integrating different advertising formats, rather than marketers concentrating on just one channel.
It’s certainly not a new idea - after all, as consumers we're exposed to many different media every day and, more pertinently, when making decisions on what to buy; so it makes sense that the best advertising campaigns are those that present us with a relevant message at each stage of that decision-making process.
This doesn't necessarily mean spending more on each campaign, but rather thinking carefully about which online elements - search, display, social media etc - to include.
What is relatively new is being able to prove the value of combining search and display in an online campaign, particularly in Europe (much of the existing research covering this area has been conducted in the US).
Here at Microsoft we’ve conducted 3 case studies in particular around campaigns in Europe, and the results are compelling. The campaigns are from the UK and France, one each from the finance, travel and technology sectors.
While the exact numbers differ between the campaigns, the results consistently show that the effect of the display advertising is magnified by supporting it with a complementary search campaign; likewise, the impact of the search advertising is greatly increased when consumers are ‘primed’ with a well-planned display schedule.
This increased impact is visible through the key measures of response (how many people visited the advertiser’s website), engagement (page views and time spent on-site), and perhaps most importantly, conversions.
In fact, the combination of search and display in an online schedule was up to 15 times more effective than the display or search elements in isolation.
Our most recent case study takes this analysis a step further, and shows that after seeing the display advertising, consumers are 50% more likely to search on a brand’s key branded keywords (those based on the brand name and any messages used in the display formats).
And, of course, once they’re searching on your brand’s keywords, consumers are one step closer to clicking through to your website...
In short, to get the most out of your search campaign, you should consider running a complementary display campaign to drive consumers to your search keywords. And every display campaign should have a well-executed search element to convert consumers’ interest to action!
If you would like more information about the research, the UK case studies are explained in more detail on the Microsoft Advertising site: click here for the travel study and here for the finance study.
The French case study is so new we haven't been able to post it yet, but will be on the Microsoft Advertising site shortly!
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15 times more effective? Sounds almost too good to be true.
Can you tell me what defines "more effective" in this context. Are you saying that a two previously non-existant brands were sent into the wild... one with a PPC campaign only and the other with a banner campaign followed by (or coordinated with) a PPC campaign and the joint campaign sold 15 times more product for the same overall spend? I am assuming not... but I am prepared to be wowed. Could someone define "more effective" in that first chart?
(Slight Aside. I remember a poster campaign on bus stops in Bristol in 1986 or so for a perfume called "Sheila". The tag line was "also kills flies". Turned out to be an experiment to see the recall of the advert/brand, even though the brand doesn't exist.)
15x more effective in this particular case – we found that the numbers vary between campaigns, though the overall effect is the same. After all, every campaign is different!
Essentially, the research involved comparing the behaviour of those who saw the advertising with control groups of people who hadn't. We worked with comScore to identify people exposed to the search advertising, those exposed to the display advertising and those exposed to both during the campaign period. A control group was then selected for each of these test groups - the controls were matched to the respective test group in terms of demographics AND online behaviour - and then the subsequent differences in behaviour observed.
The chart shows the increase in traffic to the advertiser's website generated by each form of advertising, as found by this methodology; the display increased visits among the test group by 3 percentage points compared to the control group; the combination of the two increased visits by 47 percentage points. Hence 15 times greater impact!
We tracked similarly large effects across measures of engagement (time spent on site etc) and conversions (secure sessions).
I think they are interesting numbers, but they make more sense because they prove something that we've assumed to be true through common sense.
Hope that helps explain it.
As for Sheila - sounds like a wonderful do-it-all solution! ;c)
Conversion data would be an interesting addition to the study, at least, in cases other than branding. Was the increased traffic resulting from the synergistic effect of display and search advertising more qualified than either media independently? As long as the integrated campaigns didn't sent less qualified traffic, it would still be a win.
In one of the case studies we were able to track consumers as far as the secure pages on the (travel) advertier's website. It's not quite conversions, but it's about as far as we can get whilst avoiding data protection etc issues, and it's a pretty good surrogate.
And indeed on this basis, those who had been exposed to both the search and display advertising *were* more likely to make a purchase than those who had seen only the search or just the display advertising.
So not only is there more traffic, but it's more valuable traffic too!
This is very interesting - I've just written a short piece about it on our blog (hope you don't mind me spreading the word with your pictures).
Do you have any insight into my question at the end of my post:
"Presumably most of the search traffic that display advertising drives is branded queries - and most brands rank for their brands, so the mechanic of why PPC is causing such a large uplift when combined with display is still not entirely clear to me."