Search + Display Advertising = Better Conversions : New Study
e-Consultancy reports on a study by the Atlas Institute, which shows that a combination of search and display advertising results in much higher conversion rates than adopting only either one of these two online advertising methods.
According to the study, “Exposing search users to display media from the same advertiser results in a 22 percent increase over search alone, suggesting a synergy between these two channels that cannot be measured separately”. The study had a sample size of 10.8 million display ad impressions, 2.5 million search clicks and 1.8 million users.
I’ve written previousy on the pitfalls of over-reliance on one form of marketing (predominantly search) by affiliate marketers (or for that matter, any online marketer). Undoubtedly, paid search marketing is very effective in driving instant traffic that converts, but a marketer could be missing on significant opportunities by not attempting to create visibility through other methods.
I’ve used several third party web analytics — and one thing I’ve found common is the high proportion of “Direct Access” or “No referrers” , when looking at referrer stats.
Evaluating ROI and making decisions on marketing / advertising spend without taking into account this source of unknown traffic (for example) that could be generated as a result of a series of marketing efforts would be a serious folly. For affiliates, only results count — but it’s equally important to question whether we are able to accurately measure everything that should be measured. Taking a tunnel-vision approach to measurement and marketing isn’t the way to go.
