May 27th, 2009

Does TV advertising drive web site traffic?

The answer to this question is a resounding yes. In my experience  - and if you are running optimised TV activity - then you can expect to see web response rates to TV activity of between 0.1% and 1% (measured as site visits/TV impacts).  That’s between 1,000 and 10,000 site visits per 1 million TV impacts.  This is much higher than traditional phone-based DRTV where a good response rate is around 0.05%, with weaker campaigns performing at 0.005% or even less.  Of course one could argue that a click is a much less committed response than a person to person phone call and this is generally reflected in a much lower online conversion rate from click to sale.

What do these web response rates this mean from a cost efficiency point of view? If you are paying a £3.00 CPM for TV impacts then 1 million TV impacts will cost £3,000. At a 0.5% site visit rate from TV, we’d see 5,000 site visits. This gives a cost per visit of £0.60 (60p) each. That’s a reasonable cost per click when compared to online sources of click traffic - especially search engines.

The challenge  is to make sure that the clicks you generate from TV are high quality clicks, but this is becoming easier as TV fragments and targeting opportunities increase. So how do you optimise TV to web site activity?There are two answers to this question. One is optimising how you select and use TV channels and the other is how you manage traffic when it comes to your site. Were going to look at how you achieve these objectives in a mini series over the next few posts.

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Posted by: Simon Foster
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  1. This is great info! I have spent the past 2hrs searching (I’m an SEO guy as well so that tells you it was quite a challenge) for some kind of rule of thumb for commercial to call to action of visiting a website and this is the only article I came across that actually had a % range. For that, I thank you very much!

    If you have any further resources to help with this, much appreciated. If not, you gave me the high level info I was looking for.

    Thanks again,
    Ryan Parr

    Founder and CEO
    Fantazzle Fantasy Sports Games
    http://www.fantazzle.com

  2. Simos

    Good info, thanks. One question though, what are the response rates you are quoting in the article based on? Any particular campaigns?

    Simos
    PeoplePerHour.com

  3. They are based on a live campaign from the home furnishing sector. I’m afraid client confidentiality makes it difficult for me to say much more than that. However, in my experience the pattern here is representative of a wider pattern so don’t think of this example as an isolated one-off. S

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