Posts Tagged ‘online advertising’

January 22nd, 2010

How re-messaging can grow your business

Re-messaging (sometimes called retargeting) must be one of the best kept secrets of online advertising. Yes, many brands are doing it, but many more are not - and these brands are missing a major opportunity to reach historical site visitors and re-engage with them to increase sales.

What is re-Messaging?

Re-messaging enables an advertiser to re-serve online display advertising to people who have visited their website and left without purchasing or engaging in-depth (becoming a lead, registering for newsletters etc). So, imagine that you are an ecommerce retailer selling shoes. If you get a 2.5% conversion rate to sales, that means that 97.5% of your online visitors leave your site without purchasing. That’s a lot of potential customers, potentially lost forever. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. Re-Messaging can help you bring these lost sales opportunities back into your business.

In order to run a re-messaging campaign you generally need to be working with an online advertising network. These networks gather together publishers of larger sites and do deals to sell their unsold advertising space. Nothing special there then. I agree. But here comes the interesting bit. These networks employ tracking technologoes which can detect people have been to your site and subsequently visited sites within their advertising network. It is when your past visitors visit these sites in a participating ad network that you are able to re-serve your online advertising to your past site visitors. This means you can track, follow and re-engage with people who have visited your site, but left without making a purchase.

There’s a huge creative opportunity here too. It is possible to re-message visitors who have been to specific pages within your site. Knowing which pages have been visited means you can serve custom display ads to people who have visited key pages within your site. So for example, we can identify all visitors who have been to the “Basket Completed” page, but not gone to the “Buy Now” page. These users can be served a sales reminder message such as “New Range of UGGs now in stock” or “Buy UGGS now and enjoy 5% discount until March 31st”. In this way you are able to re-incentivise past visitors who are interested in your products, but did not convert to purchase.

What kind of results can you expect from re-messaging?

In our experience click through rates in re-messaging are around five times higher than in normal online display. Conversion rates are also significantly higher because you are communicating with visitors who have already shown an interest in your site. It’s also worth mentioning that a conversion doesn’t need to be a sale; you can use re-messaging to build your database which can then form the basis of a CRM campaign. Either way, re-messaging is an extremely effective way to identify and re-connect with past visitors to your site.

Find out more about our services at www.teqtonic.com

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January 6th, 2010

Effects of online advertising beyond the click

So we’ve had more than a decade of measuring online advertising effects primarily through the generation of direct click traffic. But now many a marketer is asking ‘what effect does online advertising have beyond the click?’ Marketers want to know whether online display advertising can be justified on the basis of anything other than clicks.  The answer is yes it can - so let’s explore what some of these more difficult-to-measure beyond the click effects are. Here are seven effects of online display advertising that cannot be defined or measured by clicks alone.

  1. Online advertising drives offline sales: Online advertising drives purchase behaviour in offline channels - particularly retail and phone. This was shown by a Yahoo! and Comscore in a study (2007) that revealed 89 percent of consumers shop for information about products online, but less than 7 percent of retail sales actually take place online. These effects are not measurable in clicks, though one of our clients does undertake weekly in-store surveys to identify search terms that are driving retail traffic.
  2. Online display populates the search sales funnel: Search volumes are driven by consumer demand for information and this demand is accelerated by all forms of online and offline brand communication. Online display is one of the drivers of search term demand, but consumer response often takes place outside standard “cookie windows” or in forms that are not easy to track unless you have a form of universal tracking in place to analyse click paths. As a result this effect is not always fully understood and accounted for.
  3. Cross-media synergy: When two channels work together, engaging with the same person about the same product on the same day, there is likely to be a 2+2=5 effect. Of course it’s very difficult to quantify the precise effects of this especially on a micro level but the difficulties presented in measuring this type of cross-media synergy do not mean that the effect is not present. An ad exposure online may well stimulate a purchase elsewhere - an effect not measured by clicks.
  4. Attitudinal change: Ongoing online display is likely to drive attitudinal change over long periods of time. Over periods of weeks, months and even years, online advertising can positively re-enforce, modify and update brand perceptions. These changes are unlikely to be reflected in short-term click traffic, but are likely to be valuable to a brand from a positioning perspective.
  5. Pre and Post Purchase effects: Advertising has effects both before and after the purchase. Sometimes this is long before the purchase - when consumers are not consciously selecting products but subconsciously compiling their preferred sets. Sometimes it’s after the purchase and during ownership when consumers are reassured about their brand purchase decisions. This may result in increased future sales and increased brand loyalty, but this cannot be measured by real-time clicks.
  6. Accessibility signals: Because online is a distribution channel as well as an advertising medium, its use can send signals about accessibility to consumers. It says “we’re open for business in the digital space”. This was certainly the case with direct response advertising and direct brands where the presence of phone numbers in ads was viewed by consumers as making the company appear more accessible and ready to talk. These accessibility signals are not directly measurable by clicks.
  7. Relationship with technology: Advertising online helps to demonstrate how companies relate to digital technology and the internet. By ‘being there’ in the digital space a brand is saying that it values the digital channel as a means of communication and distribution and has the competencies required to participate. Again, a brand attribute which is not measurable by clicks alone.

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October 28th, 2009

Online ad creative can be captivating

Yes, it can. I know this isn’t anything revolutionary, but it’s fun and impactful.  Take a look here.

online-display-advertising-creative1

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June 9th, 2009

Online advertising works beyond the click

It’s an ongoing debate: just what influence does digital communication create beyond clicks? Well the short answer is a lot. It contributes the following:  subsequent search visits (product and brand terms),  subsequent direct site visits (over the short and long term), visits to retail premises in the case of retailers, visits to attractions in the case of leisure destinations and shifts in brand and product reputation in the case of branding messages and content.

Recent research from iProspect / Forrester (May 2009) supports this view. It reveals that of those who viewed online ads on an ad funded web site,  only 31% actually clicked, but a further 48% either searched for the product in a search engine or subsequently visited the site via a direct browser visit. A further 9% reported that they investigated further through social media or message boards.

forrester-click-behaviour-june09

Readers who run online campaigns will observe that few online campaigns generate click through rates as high as 31%, in fact, most display campaigns generate click rates of about 1% of that, i.e  0.31% or less.  If we factor down the other responses by a similar level, then we get to 0.27% performing a direct search and 0.21% visiting the advertising site directly through their browser.  Whilst these numbers may appear low, it does indicate that responses are many and varied and exceed the response counted as clicks alone.

I’d argue that when it comes to branding effects, such as awareness, attribution and considerations scores,  the numbers may be higher than the figures above suggest.  The problem is that we have not fully understood how to quantify these additional branding effects. There are products able to isolate groups people who are exposed to online communications and, via online surveys, compare their advertising and brand awareness to non-exposed groups, and these can reveal interesting short term results. See some of those here.

But often the changes in awareness and consideration build slowly over time, particularly in products which have to be advertised almost constantly in order to reach comparatively small groups of active buyers. Mobile network O2 springs to mind here.  Whilst much of its online display activity is designed to attract potential buyers to its online shop, there is no doubt that the constant presence of O2’s blue and white imagery on the UK’s top 250 or so web sites helps to maintain and reaffirm its credentials as a player with a big interest in the digital space.  Would we still see O2 that way of we had never seen its distinctive blue online display presence?

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May 6th, 2008

Does offline advertising drive online site visits?

Many advertisers are asking whether offline media drives their online traffic and to what degree. I recently had to review this for a major blue chip advertiser so I thought I’d share the sources and results I’ve found:

1. Jupiter/IPSOS Study
Jupiter and IPSOS got together in 2007 to survey 2,000 US web search users to analyse what drove them to make web searches. The Jupiter/IPSOS research found that 37% of respondents claimed they had searched in response to a TV ad, 30% had searched as a result of seeing a newspaper or magazine ad, 17% had searched after hearing a radio ad and 9% had searched after seeing an outdoor billboard ad. These results were higher amongst “daily searchers” i.e. people who say the use search engines at least on a daily basis. For example the percentage of daily searchers quoting TV and press/magazines as an influence climbed from 37% to 44% for TV and from 30% to 35% for a magazine ad.

2. PPA / BMRB Study
The PPA, a trade body representing UK press and magazine titles, undertook a survey of 3,045 online adults aged 16-64 during August 2007. The research found that 70% of those surveyed had visited a web site as a result of seeing offline communication and 58% of online adults have made a purchase online as a result of seeing offline messaging. When asked, “Which of the following have triggered you to go online when looking for information on products that you have considered purchasing?“ the responses were as follows:

TV - 50%
Magazines - 45%
Newspapers - 31%
Radio ads - 17%

3. Retail Advertising and Marketing Association / BIGresearch (US study)
The Retail Advertising and Marketing Association (RAMA) undertook research with BIGresearch in the US and surveyed over 15,000 consumers in its Simultaneous Media Survey. This project found the top 10 media that trigger an online search (Adults 18+) to be:

51.6% Magazine
47.7% Read an Article
44.2% TV / Broadcast
41.3% Newspaper
35.6% Cable TV
35.3% Face-to-Face Communication
33.8% Coupons
30.3% Email Advertising
29.3% Direct Mail
28.2% Radio

4. Hitwise Media Impact Report
This report contains good case studies from the AA, Orange and Sky. Key take outs are firstly that integrated campaigns drive greater levels of search volume and secondly that product specific advertising in offline channels e.g. press can have a positive uplift effect on the search terms that reflect the product being advertised in that offline channel.

Understanding your own traffic sources
All brands have their own DNA and industry and category level research will only give you an indication of how offline media might drive online traffic to your web site. Only a bespoke analysis using your own media data and search/web traffic logs will help you to understand how offline media drives traffic to your site.

There’s no need to get into intricate modelling to reveal these relationships. Most statisticians will begin even the most complex analysis by simply plotting media activity looking for patterns. Try plotting your media activity (e.g. spend, impacts or GRPs) and search traffic volume data (only relevant terms) into charts and observing the patterns. This may be sufficient to illustrate whether offline media is driving traffic to your site.

Your analysis will be much stronger if you are able to strip out all referred traffic and focus on direct traffic when looking for these relationships. If you use a reporting tool like Google Analytics, you can strip out all traffic source data that can be explained by other activity such as paid search, banner campaigns or link referrals. You are then able to isolate direct organic search traffic coming into your site and compare that with your media activity.

Larger brands with more complex and inter-related traffic drivers may have to undertake more sophisticated econometric modelling to isolate the effect of individual traffic-driving variables and remove the effects of underlying seasonality and brand awareness.

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August 24th, 2007

How would online advertising fare in a recession?

Recent uncertainties about US credit and its distribution throughout the world economy have meant that we’ve been seeing and hearing a lot more of the word “recession”. Naturally, this has prompted occupants of the online world to ask how another recession might affect them now the Internet is a far more established part of marketing. This might seem like a very daunting question, answerable only by those in possession of a crystal ball, but in fact, advertiser behaviour in a recession follows a reasonably predictable pattern. Here’s a brief summary of what is likely to happen:

1) Advertisers spend less: For many companies, a line of red ink through the ad budget is a quick and easy way to put some more money on the bottom line. If there’s no immediate and significant downward effect on sales, then many senior managers will see it as a painless way to maintain profits.

2) Advertising gets cheaper: As there’s still roughly the same number of advertising opportunities, but lower market demand, the cost of advertising falls.

3) It’s easier to cut through: With many advertisers spending less and the price of advertising falling, advertisers who maintain budgets get more cut through for the same money. Old hands at advertising like P&G and Unilever know this, and almost always maintain spend in a recession. For them, it’s a good time to invest in their brands.

4) There’s a focus on measurable sales results: In a recession companies want to maintain sales. As a result, tactical direct marketing often fares much better in a recession than brand advertising. If an ad budget can be shown to be make a direct contribution to sales, it is more defendable. The marketing manager who can say, “If you cut my budget by 50%, my sales will fall by 50% and here’s the proof” is far more likely to retain budget than the marketing manager who cannot.

So, where does this leave online?

Because the lion’s share of online advertising is evaluated by its ability to deliver clicks, leads and sales I believe online media would be in a relatively strong position if we were to enter a recession. There would be increased investment in online as more companies sought to invest in channels that are seen to deliver sales.

Superficially, this might look good. But ironically, it’s likely to be bad news for existing online advertisers. This is for two reasons. Firstly, increased demand for online could have an inflationary effect on costs, particularly in highly accountable areas of online marketing like paid search - where increased demand would manifest itself in higher bid prices. Secondly, as well as experiencing higher bid or CPM prices, advertisers would experience more message competition as more companies switched their budgets into online.

So the ‘net’ effect of a recession would be superficially good (higher online spends) but fundamentally bad (higher online prices and a more crowded marketplace). I think this would affect different areas of the online marketing community in different ways. For online media owners, it’s good news - they’d experience increased demand and higher prices. For digital agencies it’s both good and bad; more advertisers spending online, but it becomes harder to get cheap deals. And for advertisers, it becomes more difficult to maintain a low cost of sales.

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