Display Converts Better Than Search? Seriously?

It has long been a given that search adver­tis­ing con­verts at a higher rate than dis­play adver­tis­ing. Search is essen­tially the only form of adver­tis­ing where a con­sumer actu­ally asks to be shown an ad. Dis­play func­tions much more like tra­di­tional media where you don’t really want to see an ad but you’ll endure one in exchange for your favorite tele­vi­sion shows, tunes or news on the radio or web content.

So if a given con­sumer isn’t even inter­ested in see­ing an ad while view­ing a given web page, why would they be more apt to click on it and pur­chase some­thing? They wouldn’t, we in search mar­ket­ing have always said, and they gen­er­ally don’t. When they’re ready to buy, they’ll tap their request into a search engine and make the purchase.

The Wall St. Jour­nal Reports It So It Must Be True

You can imag­ine my sur­prise when the ven­er­a­ble Wall Street Jour­nal pub­lished a story explain­ing how dis­play ads may be more effec­tive than search ads. Check out “Ral­ly­ing Cry for Dis­play Ads” (or this sim­i­lar piece from Wired if you’re not a WSJ subscriber).

The piece ref­er­ences the recent research from the Atlas Insti­tute, Microsoft’s research arm from the aQuan­tive acqui­si­tion, that states that dis­play is actu­ally more valu­able than search because it leads peo­ple down the con­ver­sion path. With­out dis­play, they argue, there’d be no search; or there’d be much less of it. If only adver­tis­ers and agen­cies attrib­uted con­ver­sions appro­pri­ately they’d be will­ing to pay much more for these valu­able placements.

What are “View-through” Conversions?

The basis of this claim is in “view-through” con­ver­sions, or con­ver­sions that occur after some­body has viewed a ban­ner ad. My issue with this claim is we have no real infor­ma­tion on how many users actu­ally look at ban­ner ads. To what degree are peo­ple tun­ing them out, and how can you assume two sim­i­lar users are pay­ing equal to atten­tion to a given ban­ner placement?

Other than these obvi­ous issues, there is a cer­tain logic to “view-through” con­ver­sions that makes sense. Some peo­ple are dri­ven to search because of a ban­ner ad they saw. Of course, the same logic applies to tele­vi­sion radio, word of mouth, bill­boards, and count­less other adver­tis­ing and PR chan­nels. Here’s a graphic show­ing, roughly, where search vol­ume comes from:

All of these lead to search vol­ume and it seems nobody has any real grasp on how much, and how much credit these chan­nels should receive.

Con­ver­sion Attri­bu­tion: A Wor­thy Undertaking

I com­mend Atlas for tak­ing a stab at this and hope more adver­tis­ers push them­selves to pur­sue stud­ies for their own ad pro­grams. What they’ll likely find, in my view, is a media allo­ca­tion between search and dis­play (and other chan­nels should they take it fur­ther) that makes more sense than their cur­rent allocation.

In Omni­ture Search­Cen­ter you can develop a cus­tomized “Con­ver­sion Fun­nel” and deter­mine which chan­nels your con­ver­sions are com­ing from. I’ve removed any data from the graphic below but in addi­tion to the rudi­men­tary “Impres­sions > Clicks > Orders” you may want to develop your own model for what’s dri­ving those ini­tial impres­sions, and attribute a per­cent­age of your orders to each impression.

As a Search Mar­keter, our future depends on this type of analy­sis. I don’t think search could thrive with­out other forms of media, nor do I think search is wholly depen­dent on those chan­nels. One of the rea­sons it’s so suc­cess­ful is its mea­sur­a­bil­ity. We know exactly how much to pay for a click because using tools like Omni­ture Search­Cen­ter we get instant feed­back on the per­for­mance of a given “place­ment” (i.e. click) and react. By automat­ing this we can spend more time on strat­egy and less time on management.

I’ll talk a lit­tle more about dis­play ads in my next post. Stay tuned!