Search Engine Marketing gets a lot of the focus these days, and rightly so. When you consider that the industry average click thru rate for display banners is around 0.05 %, it’s easy to see why so many people dismiss banners as a viable marketing tactic. However, we need to keep in mind that the CTR is only one metric.
Recently ComScore published a great white paper that you can get right here, that details how we need to look at the effectiveness of online display advertising.
A few of the key nuggets in the report are:
It’s clear that display advertising, despite a lack of clicks, can have a significant positive impact on:
- Visitation to the advertiser’s Web site (lift of at least 46% over a four week period)
- The likelihood of consumers conducting a search query using the advertiser’s branded terms (a lift of at least 38% over a four week period) – Consumers’ likelihood of buying the advertised brand online (an average 27% lift in online sales)
- Consumers’ likelihood of buying at the advertiser’s retail store (an average lift of 17%)
This chart from the study shows that site traffic does increase when running banners, but not necessarily immediately.
And this chart shows that a greater interest in the brand, as represented through search, takes place after running the ads.
The long story short is you can’t just look at the CTR. That’s only one piece of data. You also need to take into account several other measures and really focus on the main objective for the campaign. Once you do that, it becomes easy to determine if banners are a viable tactic.
Head of Social Media at Walgreens. Interactive marketer, innovator, boat rocker, continuous learner, movie lover, risk taker, dad and all around good guy. I'm always up for a spirited conversation. These are my thoughts and ramblings, not those of my employer.
