Sorry: It’s Not Quite This Simple…
So banner ads work. Specifically, consumers exposed to banner ads are more likely to search for brand terms than those who aren’t. Display ads boost both paid and organic searches and clicks.
According to an article on MediaPost, the post-campaign lift numbers ran like this:
Automotive 144% CPG 22% Health 260%
News & Media 144% Personal Finance 206%
Retail 69% Travel & Tourism 274%
AVERAGE LIFT: 155%
Source: comScore Ad Effectiveness Data, December 2008
So basically, these people spent twelve months and god knows how much money to learn… ADVERTISING WORKS!
Why is this news? Does anyone in our business read this story and think “well, that’s a bit of a shocker”?
Sadly, experience says that too many do: too many marketing people lack faith in our business. To me, that says they have either gotten too far away from the core of the advertising business…or they should get away now.
By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79
Right. Is this really a shocker to anyone in the ad biz.
What this data tells us (and what we should tell clients) is that search engine traffic is affected by banner advertising. According to this data it appears that clients in the Health category could see a 260% drop in search engine traffic if they killed their banner advertising.
A CPG site we work on gets 60% of its traffic from search engines. So you can see what an impact this could have.
What is interesting is that it appears that CPG only gets a 22% lift. The least of all of them. So if CPG gets only 22% lift from display ads BUT sees most of their traffic come from organic search does that mean that offline is carrying the weight? Why the 260% in healthcare? Lack of offline?
Curious.