When it comes to brick and mortar retailers, Walmart is clearly the market leader just by its sheer size. In fact, Walmart’s dominance transfers online where it received 33M visitors in August which was 10% more than the next closest brick and mortar rival, Target. Not only does Walmart attract more consumers but it is also growing at a faster rate than Target. For the past 6 months Walmart.com has seen double digit year-over-year growth in site visitors, outpacing the growth rate for Target.com.

One might wonder how a giant like Walmart continues to maintain such strong growth. One reason is their aggressive online advertising campaigns. In the past six months, Walmart has run several prominent display ad placements on the front pages of large portals like Yahoo! and AOL.

But just how effective are these six-figure investments?

We took a look at a one-day homepage campaign that Walmart ran on the AOL homepage on August 6th. We compared consumers who were exposed to this ad against 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.

Our data below show that the Walmart campaign had an immediate impact on the exposed consumers, driving an 81% greater rate of visitation to the site just within the first week after exposure. More interestingly, the impact of this campaign carried through to four weeks post exposure. With each passing week after August 6th, exposed consumers visited Walmart.com at a higher rate than the control group. By the fourth week, 27% of exposed consumers had visited Walmart.com which is 52% greater than the control group.

This was only one of multiple homepage campaigns that Walmart has run so far this year. Imagine the compound impact of all these campaigns on site visitation to Walmart.com. Clearly, powerful online advertising is one factor driving this retailer’s online growth.

In addition to running prominent online display advertising, Walmart has also been testing various ad formats, from clickable video to more involved interactive ad units. So in part 2 of this blog series, we will investigate differences in the impact on online behavior for these various ad formats. Stay tuned!

Last week, Compete launched Ad Impact, a new offering that measures the effectiveness of online advertising. We decided to take Ad Impact for a test drive and what better place to start than with an online ad for auto insurance.

You may recognize the character above from Progressive’s peppy TV commercials. The character’s name is Flo and it turns out she has something of a cult following.

Flo has her own unofficial fan site and Wikipedia entry. “The strange allure of the Progressive insurance girl”, as Austin360.com put it, even has Ad Age’s Bob Garfield saying she “is a weirdly sincere, post-modern Josephine the Plumber who just really wants to help.”

On June 15, Flo received premier placement on the MSN homepage, generating significant insurance shopper interest for Progressive.

Using Compete’s Ad Impact, we know that MSN homepage visitors who saw Flo’s banner ad were twice as likely to visit Progressive.com and 2.4X as likely to search using the term “Progressive” in the week after seeing her ad.

As one would expect, Ad Impact often shows lifts in viewthrough to the advertiser’s site and in brand searches from ad exposed individuals. But who are these individuals responding to Progressive Flo and what can we learn about advertising from them?

Ad Impact shows that females, ages 25 – 44 that earn $30– 60k were more likely than other demographic buckets to visit Progressive.com after seeing Flo’s ad.

A bit of internet sleuthing suggests that Flo herself fits this profile. Her MySpace page says she is 39 and I’d bet that blisteringly well-lit abstraction, the Progressive store, pays her a retail salary between $30 – 60k.

So while blogger Tim Nudd at AdFreak admits that “Dudes have a thing for Flo”, it’s really women that are demographically similar to Flo that respond to her ads, at least on MSN.

I’m not sure if Progressive was targeting women like Flo when their ad agency created her, but I’d suspect they are pleased with the results – a broadly appealing character that has won cult-like attention from men and women alike and a core constituency of women that identify with her persona.

The summer movie blockbuster season is just about here, with major new releases set to hit theaters in the next couple weeks. Studies show that advertising support can break or make a blockbuster in the lead up to opening night.

On the web, movie advertisers love big, bold banners on popular movie sites like Yahoo! Movies, Fandango and MySpace. Here at Compete, we’ve got an eye on the MySpace homepage and saw some great looking creative in May.

In a recent post, we saw how 72% of MySpace visitors saw the homepage – the crown jewel in MySpace’s strategy to sell advertising like portals. That’s a huge volume of impressions, but how valuable are they really?

To get a better sense, we looked at same day viewthrough or the rate at which ad-exposed unique visitors visited the movie page.

Terminator Salvation clearly kicked MySpace movie ad butt! At 0.80% Viewthrough, Terminator outperformed the average by 2.7x.

Fractions of a percent may not seem like much, but keep in mind that MySpace had nearly 57 million unique visitors last month – that translates to tens of thousands of ad viewthroughs everyday.

Some fans just can’t get enough. We also took a look at those MySpace users who saw a movie ad and decided to do a little research.

Ah, the Trekkies. Of course, geekdom went crazy when Star Trek came to the silver screen last month. MySpace geeks (not an oxymoron) were no exception, with .11% of ad exposed visitors also heading warp speed over to IMDB.

As the biggest movie research site on the net, it’s not exactly, “Going boldy where no man has gone before.” But with at 3.2x the average for other movies on MySpace in May, it certainly got us thinking…

What if both winners joined up for a sequel? “Terminator Trekkers.” Now that’s one movie that MySpacers would pay to see!

The biggest day of the year for the flower industry is Mother’s Day. As a follow up to our study of Valentine’s Day advertising, we took a look at homepage ads that ran ahead of this crucial holiday, when weekly traffic to major flower retailer sites can shoot up as much as 500%.

Once again, 1800Flowers.com and ProFlowers.com took out full-day banner ads on the AOL.com, MSN.com and Yahoo.com homepages. As Ad Age’s Michael Learmonth has written, homepage ad campaigns are “national in scope, approach the reach of TV ad campaigns and are high-impact and expensive.”

Clearly ProFlowers was the winner in this head-to-head match up on viewthrough and conversion… but what about homepage visitors who saw a ProFlowers ad, but didn’t end up buying there?

A homepage visitor may have seen a ProFlowers ad, visited the site and then decided to shop around for a better deal. This kind of online cross-shopping is especially common in commodity categories like flower retailing and is evident in the search queries conducted after an ad exposure.

Also, sometimes ad viewers unconsciously register ad impressions and attribute them to the advertiser’s competitor. This is especially true if the ad viewer is loyal to the competitor or if the competitor has other ads in-market or a stronger brand.

In either case, cross-shopping or miss-attribution, the advertiser loses out on a potential sale.

The charts above shows purchases made by 1-800-Flowers and ProFlowers ad exposed groups. We kept the groups mutually exclusive to ensure that viewers of one homepage ad were not influenced by the other.

It shows a surprising data point: ProFlowers came up winning more purchases than any other flower retailer – even more than 1-800-Flowers ad viewers who did not see a ProFlowers ad!

That’s incredible given the cost of homepage ads (upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single day) and makes me hope, for 1-800-Flowers’ sake, that ProFlowers ran a lot of other ads, not just on portal homepages.

Also surprising: even though it won more purchases than any other flower retailer, ProFlowers still captured less than 50% of purchases from homepage visitors exposed to their ads. FTD took a full quarter of purchases made by ProFlower’s ad viewers and 1-800-Flowers took another 22%.

That means that despite everything ProFlowers does well, from a huge ad budget to dynamic landing pages to an optimized conversion funnel, they still lose out on a significant share of interest that they originated. What can ProFlowers do to counteract? For one, take a closer look at their cross-shopping customers. Who knew Mother’s Day could be so cut-throat?

To read up on the latest trends in advertising effectiveness, visit blog.compete.com/adimpact. To contact us regarding custom research project for your advertising or publishing, visit www.compete.com/adimpact or email us at adimpact@compete.com.

A few weeks ago we wrote a blog about a case study on the effectiveness of two ads Kohl’s ran on the homepage of MSN and the homepage of AOL. Recall that the difference between the two ads Kohl’s ran was that the one on AOL was not the standard 300×250 but a larger IAB ad unit size of 300×600. The larger ad did in fact drive nearly 30% more visits to Kohls.com on the same day than the 300×250 on MSN. But how does the Kohl’s ad on AOL compare to other retail campaigns?

In the month of May, Walmart ran a few full day homepage ads on AOL.com. We compared the results for Walmart’s campaigns on AOL with Kohl’s. AOL homepage visitors were over 2x more likely to also visit Walmart.com on the days Walmart ran their ads compared to visitors to Kohls.com on the day that Kohl’s ran its large ad on AOL. The visitation overlap is higher for Walmart because it is a much bigger company getting nearly 6x more monthly visitors to its site compared to Kohl’s (29MM vs. 5MM in April). However, compared to the average visitation to these retail sites by AOL homepage visitors on non-campaign days, Kohl’s saw a greater increase in traffic to its site on the day it ran the homepage ad compared to the increase in traffic Walmart saw on its campaign days.

Site visitation and shopping cart activity on Kohls.com increased by 100% as a result of the homepage ad on AOL. In comparison, Walmart saw a lift of 25% for visitors to Walmart.com but shopping cart activity saw less impact when it ran homepage ads on AOL. The better results Kohl’s saw is probably due to a combination of both the larger ad size as well as its compelling offer for free shipping and measurable cost savings compared to Walmart’s call to action for ‘click to see more patio collection.’ The lesson learned is that in this economy, retailers who address cost savings will see the gain.

To learn more about Compete ad effectiveness solutions and to download the original ad effectiveness study for Kohl’s, visit compete.com/adimpact.

If you’ve visited the homepages of Yahoo!, AOL or MSN in the past couple of months, you may have noticed some really big banner ads. The online publishing industry has been experimenting with new ad sizes and formats lately, and it’s led to some very eye catching advertising.

On the left is the ubiquitous “Medium Regular” banner ad that Kohl’s ran on the MSN homepage. On the right is the same ad, which ran on AOL in larger format.

As you might expect the larger ad got many more clickthroughs, even as a percentage of visitors who saw the ad. But so what? Kohl’s doesn’t want to sell page views to people who see their ads, they want to sell blenders. And that’s where the story gets interesting. You might not expect it, but the small ad actually performed 1.7 percentage points better in driving purchase.

Perhaps that’s not surprising because once someone clicked through either ad, they ended up on the same landing page. In other words, the larger ad drew the attention of more would-be shoppers, but the smaller ad found a greater concentration of motivated buyers.

Which ad size worked better? That depends on Kohl’s objective - were they after attention or conversion? Both ads demonstrated strength.

To speak with a sales representative about Compete’s Ad Impact post-buy analysis and advertising effectiveness studies, visit compete.com/adimpact or email adimpact@compete.com.

To read up on the latest trends in advertising effectiveness, visit blog.compete.com/adimpact.