Show the impact of advertising on search marketing

Sometimes, search marketing works so well that it's easy to stop using other online strategies that are too expensive to sell or less effective. But in fact, deleting other marketing channels is likely to be bad for your search advertising campaign.

If you look carefully at your marketing expenses, you will find that display ads often belong to this kind of advertising tactics, that is, the conversion rate is very low, but the cost of a single purchase is very high.

However, just because of the direct conversion rate does not consider the use of display ads, may seem a little short-sighted. Display ads are usually just bad for "like" conversions, but if you look at other metrics, such as browsing conversions, potential conversion rates, and "improving search rankings", you will have a more holistic view of the effort to display advertising for overall advertising and search marketing.

Don't discount the impact of display ads on search

Display advertising early in the consumer decision-making process has played an important role. It increases the visibility of the product and the probability that users will consider buying it. This is mainly because it provides only a preliminary message that the user may return to continue viewing and form a transformation. This return visit tends to "add points" to search marketing, as users typically look for the brand or related product name (and then click on a paid search link). The problem is, if the user first sees the display ad and then returns to the original page by clicking on the paid search ad, who should be credited with this conversion? This attribution problem really makes a lot of marketing people feel very headache.

Many studies have shown that advertising has a huge impact on the amount and the number of searches that drive organic search and paid search. Today we'll talk about some of these factors and how they affect your search strategy.

The effect of quantitative display advertisement on search

Many media companies have done some research to show that advertising has an impact on search behavior and the success of search marketing.

Yahoo Advertising has conducted various forms of research and case studies on this subject. Over time, the company confirmed that there was a strong correlation between display advertising and improved search rankings.

A Yahoo retailer survey found that retailers ' display ads will increase their conversion rate by 59%. In the survey, Yahoo also cites data from Third-party research firms that show how advertising promotes consumer search behavior.

"Some 31% of users will click on the ads themselves, and 27% of users will search the company, the brand or the product through search engines," iprospect, a study by the market research firm Forrester, the search marketing company, was quoted as saying. This means that when a display ad allows the user to react immediately, it also has the ability to search for ads because the display ads themselves can be clicked by the user. ”

Yahoo also cites another research agency, MediaMind, for 2010 years. The study found that, contrary to popular belief, more network conversions were actually coming from the display channel (72%) than from the search channel (23%). And, in fact, 5% of these conversions are created by: users see the display ad before they see the search AD.

But it is clear that media companies like Yahoo have a lot of interest in promoting this idea, because they offer both search marketing programs and display advertising products. However, if it is a third party report, the findings are similar.

A report by another U.S. research firm also said that in the U.S. market, the number of users willing to visit the site increased by 49%, and the number of users who queried the brand increased by 40%. In the European market, this growth will be more obvious, "in the European market, 72% of consumers who have seen internet advertising are more willing to visit advertisers ' websites, and 94% of consumers may search for advertising brands ..."

In a field study at Stanford University, "showing the impact of advertising: improving search rankings and social influence," researchers found that consumers who had seen the display ad were able to increase the number of search queries related to advertising activities by 5% to 25%, compared with those who had not seen the display.

Main factors to be considered by marketers

Now that you know that display advertising does have a certain impact on search marketing, how will this change our approach to these two marketing strategies? Standing at a high altitude, I have identified the following points to consider:

Identify their roles: it is important to understand how different tactics play a role in acquiring customers. As mentioned above, the main role of display advertising is to improve brand awareness, and to complement the role of channels, and search advertising in the promotion of immediate user purchase and direct response has a better effect. Understanding the different roles of the two strategies will play an important role in the next two considerations.

Marketing Mix: In order to maximize coverage and improve the conversion rate, it is best to plan a display advertising and search ads are included in the integrated network marketing strategy. You may find that although search ads can facilitate more direct conversions, the number of conversions is not enough to achieve the desired goal. At this point, you can consider proportional increase in the display of advertising investment to promote the search volume.

Performance evaluation: When evaluating the effectiveness of display ads, it is critical to avoid viewing only the immediate click-through rate and the same conversion data. You may not be able to measure display ads entirely with those metrics that measure the effectiveness of search ads. In addition to the metrics you usually refer to, you may need to set up additional key metrics to measure the effectiveness of the display ads. Maybe you should consider developing a model to calculate the conversion rate of various network marketing strategies.

(Original: May 9, 2011, compiled: Zeng Cui)