Remarketing is a form of exceptionally targeted display advertising, in that it is only shown to previous visitors to a website.
Its very effective, but difficult to prove. If people see an Ad, don’t click, but then come to the site directly, how do you prove that? The bonus is that we don’t pay if people don’t click. It makes for incredible value!
Is it possible that Display Advertising could get interesting too? I’ve been casting eyes in that direction.
Here’s the skinny
Essentially, display advertising produces searches, as well as clicks. Which is great, because you only pay for clicks.
On the other hand, way more people search for the brand, but you can’t trace it to the original Ad.
So because this is a correlated activity, rather than connected, you’re getting more back than you can prove. Cue hand wringing and muttering about ‘attribution’ of spend to results.
Revisiting Display
Thanks to a presentation by Nate Wood (https://twitter.com/NateWood) at Biddable World recently, I’ve been revisiting display advertising, because I have always suspected the same impact, but on a different or lower scale.
Nate mentioned a presentation on a study of Display advertising, which was brilliant. Attached, The Silent Click, Building Brands Online.
The Silent Click: Building Brands Online
Essentially, although the figures make little sense on their own, there was a 50% uplift in brand searches after the advertising – and brand searches convert quite well (generalisation).
Slide 15 onwards is great. More visits, more engagement and higher spends.
Other benefits of display
Independently, Nate showed an uplift in CTR (click through rate) on normal Search Ads for people exposed to advertising, another unmeasured (or unmeasurable?) benefit.
Getting more market share is an amazing achievement when the traffic is very profitable. Exciting, and yet invisible.
I love the irony that people steer away from Display Advertising because nobody clicks the Ads. And yet, there is business being generated that is undetectable, that we don’t pay for.
Interesting Future
Now, this is great to know. And lets imagine that the ad networks can give us more granulated ways of segmenting our audiences, and having tailored conversations with them, might not that start to get interesting?
Then we get news that we get even more ways of segmenting interest, or dividing into audiences.
http://analytics.blogspot.in/2014/01/improving-remarketing-with-google.html
Long may this continue. Really looking forward to the studies, or making them!