Sometimes, it seems like omniscience.  With our Ad Impact product, we’re able to measure the impact of advertising exposure on online behavior.  Did an ad lead to more visits, searches, sales?  The answer rests comfortably in Compete’s data.  This gives us an enviable perspective on how (and whether!) specific ads and ad strategies work.

But of course, it takes work and experience to turn data and information into intelligence and insights.  (Omniscience would be deadly boring, if you think about it.)  Though we’ve been doing advertising effectiveness analysis for over a year now, we’re continually learning new things about online advertising.  The newest learning?  The time-honored concept of “advertising decay” is a myth.

Continue reading “The Myth of Advertising Decay” »

If you are an advertiser who wants to drive large volumes of traffic to your site, there are two important things you are probably looking for:  reach and ease of implementing your campaign.  Facebook meets these qualifications.  It is currently the third largest site online with 125MM visitors in September and it is quickly approaching parity with the #1 and #2 publishers, Google and Yahoo.

Continue reading “Dicing into Facebook Ads” »

When you take a look at online display ads today, it is usually automotive or entertainment companies that have splashy eye-catching ads.  But leave it to Apple to pave the way for more exciting ads that standout in the Tech category.  Apple has made headlines before with creative video ads aimed at attacking its rival Microsoft on the front pages of top news sites like Wall Street Journal and New York Times.  These ads first appeared almost two years ago and have since ran several more times.

Continue reading “Apple Having a Little Fun” »

Is online advertising a good vehicle for reaching brand advertising goals?  Judged by their actions, more and more advertisers are voting “yes.”  During the past several months, we’ve observed a gradual but decisive stride from an ambivalent stance toward a full embrace of online media as a branding tool.

This past week, we witnessed a Ford display campaign that to us represented a noteworthy waypoint in the development of online ads designed for branding objectives: ads that reject the click. 

Continue reading “Ads That Reject The Click” »

According to the Google Keyword Tool,there were 7.5 million broad match searches on the term ‘soap’ in September.  Granted that some of the searches are related to “soap operas” rather than cleansing soaps, there are still quite a few people searching for the term.  CPG companies are fueling this growth in search with increased investment in online advertising.  In fact, according to TNS, one of the leading soap brands Dove spent nearly $5MM on online display advertising during the first half of this year.  This investment is significantly greater than that of rival brands Softsoap and Olay.  Due in part to their investment in online advertising, Compete’s data shows that site traffic to Dove.com are multiples greater than its competitors.

Over one million consumers visited Dove’s website in August.  This volume is comparable to the number of consumers visiting sites like Bravo TV, The New Yorker and Morningstar.  So how does Dove maintain its online visitor volume using display advertising?  Many of you have probably seen a Dove ad online recently.  We went back a few months and examined two campaigns that Dove ran on both Yahoo! and AOL in late July.  We isolated exposed consumers who saw the Dove ad and compared their behavior to a group of control consumers who did not see the ad but were otherwise similar in behavior and composition.  Take a look at the search results below.

On Yahoo!, exposed consumers were nearly twice as likely to search for the Dove brand as control consumers who did not see the ad up to a week after the campaign ended.  The ad on AOL resulted in an even greater shift in consumer behavior prompting exposed consumers to search at nearly twice the rate than those on Yahoo.  The incremental search activity for Dove is not just a sign of online success, it is also a sign of brand strength and consumer recollection. So it is no wonder that according to the Google Keyword Tool, there were 2.2 MM searches for Dove in September compared to 823K searches for Olay and 60K searches for Softsoap.  The ads did drive direct traffic to Dove’s site, but Dove got even greater value from the incremental searches and the resulting “indirect” traffic.  Here is another great example that shows that online advertising indeed works!

Last week we looked at how retail king Walmart has used online display advertising to drive growth in site visitors at a faster rate than its rivals. So far this year, Walmart has run several prominent display campaigns on high reach placements like the homepages of AOL and Yahoo!. Of course the marketing team at Walmart is savvy enough to test and vary the creative, messaging and the format of these expensive ad placements.

We took a look at two executions that Walmart used for two different one-day homepage takeovers on AOL. The first one pictured below is a non-interactive ad unit that ran in late May. A few months later in early August, Walmart ran an interactive ad also on the AOL homepage (pictured on the right below). We define an interactive ad as an ad that shows more information within the unit when a consumer clicks on it rather than immediately directing the consumer to a landing page or a website. Note that in the case of the Walmart interactive ad, it is essentially a mini circular within the ad unit. Shoppers can click on a section (i.e. Girls’ Apparel) which takes you to a different department and they can then scroll through the products. What better way to really engage shoppers in the shopping process as well as accommodate a broader spectrum of audience? So what were the results of these two campaigns?

Using the Compete Ad Impact product, we measured the online behavior of consumers exposed to the Walmart ads compared to a control group of consumers who were not exposed but were otherwise similar in behavior and composition. The comparison of the exposed behavior against a control group allows us to measure the true lift of the campaign on online behavior. For site visitation, both campaigns saw a significant increase in visits to Walmart by the exposed group compared to the control group. For the non-interactive campaign, exposed consumers were 54% more likely to visit Walmart.com compared to the control. However, the interactive unit saw a larger lift of 69%. How about the quality of traffic that these campaigns drove?

We went deeper and looked at consumers who started the online checkout process on Walmart.com. Both campaigns saw double-digit lifts for this behavior as well. However, the interactive unit resulted in 3.5x greater lift for the checkout process. It drove 82% more consumers to start the checkout process than the 24% lift for the standard non-interactive ad.

So what can we learn from this? Like Walmart, advertisers can make calculated marketing investments to drive their revenue. The interactive unit which is almost comparable to an entire circular within the space of a 300×250 ad unit was probably more expensive for Walmart than the standard ad. However, we can see that it delivered better results because it also drove a significantly greater volume of quality traffic that engaged in the checkout process. Depending on how good Walmart is at negotiating with their interactive agency, perhaps they even got an attractive return on their investment.