It's Time For Better Web Marketing Analytics: OPA Study Reaffirms Display Ads Drive Search

Following up my recent post on campaign attribution a couple weeks ago, a new study is out showing the lift effects of display on search. The Online Publishers Association study titled, “The Silent Click: Building Brands Online” reported that when visitors are exposed to display ads:

• One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites
• Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages
• Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands
• Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites

This is just one of many studies over the past few years that has stressed the importance of running both display and search campaigns as part of your online marketing strategy. But again, I stress that these studies only go so far in helping you (the advertiser) understand the value of display and search for your own online marketing efforts.

While these studies provide great insight, they don't provide actionable results for your own business. In order to get actionable results, you have to start using the proper campaign measurement tools (such as Yahoo's free Full Analytics solution), so that you can see for yourself that your display campaigns are assisting in driving conversions for your other campaigns (such as search).

I'll keep talking about this until I'm blue in the face. But every time one of these new studies comes out, it just reaffirms my position on the need for analytics tools that provide both measurement of multiple ad channels and the appropriate attribution metrics to go along with it.

I've been talking about the value of cross channel attribution metrics on this blog for about a year and a half now. It's time to get on the bandwagon people. As Jerry Maquire famously said as he was leaving his sports agent firm...

"Who's coming with me?"

Below you'll find links to a few of my previous posts on this topic:

http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2008/11/03/measuring-search-and-display-for-success/

http://mattlillig.blogspot.com/2008/12/yahoo-assistsput-money-back-into-your.html

http://mattlillig.blogspot.com/2008/07/yahoo-assists-are-higher-than.html

http://mattlillig.blogspot.com/2007/06/yahoo-assists-in-helping-their.html

http://mattlillig.blogspot.com/2008/11/measuring-search-and-display-for.html