Can TV Advertising Really Impact Search Performance?

It’s relatively easy to report what happened in an ad campaign, but much more difficult to understand why things happen. Visits or conversions might go up or down, but why? It could be some form of seasonality or maybe your latest review hit the front page of Reddit. The mysteries of consumer behavior like to […]

Chat with SearchBot

It’s relatively easy to report what happened in an ad campaign, but much more difficult to understand why things happen. Visits or conversions might go up or down, but why? It could be some form of seasonality or maybe your latest review hit the front page of Reddit. The mysteries of consumer behavior like to be hidden in the shadows of other events that have happened prior to and during the timeframe in question.

Connecting Online & Offline Advertising

Drawing connections between online and offline advertising efforts is full of externalities and question marks. Seasonality, sales, budgets, timing, and the lack of tracking in offline mediums combine to form murky waters and inconclusive correlations between offline flights and online marketing results.

In response, we do our best to ensure common messaging to users at the same stage of the buying cycle. Online display or video should be inline with TV as both increase branded awareness reach, while email and direct mail solidify relationships through deals and search results, both paid and organic, should highlight key value propositions learned in the research phase.

Despite all the externalities working against online and offline correlations, at some point, if there’s a strong enough connection between offline advertising and online marketing success, we have to take notice.

How TV Ads Boost Traffic From Search & Other Channels

One such case is the impact of television ads on online marketing channels. An advertiser I’ve been fortunate enough to work with over the years, an online subscription service provider, has intermittently run TV flights over the past few years with great success. TV ads get run and various online channels observe a bump in volume during the flight as shown below.

Visits By Channel Edited

The graph above shows the relative boost in traffic broken out by channel during a TV flight. During the 10 week reporting timeframe, visitors increased by 15-25% across organic search, paid advertising, and email relative to the rolling average (100%).

We would expect a significant brand awareness push to trickle down to branded paid and organic search, but the reality has extended beyond brand into core non-brand terms as well, as shown below.

Brand V Non Brand

There is a logical lag between launching the TV flight and search getting a lift. On the flip side there is also a lag time between the flight ending and the impact on search reverting to a more normal trend.

Most importantly, this is not a one-time occurrence. Over the course of more than a dozen TV flights, we continued to observe core non-brand search terms generate 25-30% incremental visitors while maintaining normal conversion rates, resulting in great performance.

How TV Flights Impact CTR In Paid Search

It’s important to note that in non-brand paid search visitors/clicks increase disproportionately to impressions, or in other words, CTR goes up during the flight, highlighting increased brand awareness during and immediately following TV flights as shown below.

Non Brand Ctr

With a naturally increased CTR, we can push for incremental volume through bidding and maintain normal CPCs as we benefit from a Quality Score boost.

So, does this mean you should go out and spend millions on TV spots? Not necessarily… this is one example where it works. Before investing in TV, maybe try display and develop a strategy to align messaging across channels, reaching users at common stages in the sales funnel.

As observed in the example above, an end-to-end brand and direct response strategy can have a cumulative impact on user engagement that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Experimentation is good, and while tracking is difficult between online and offline advertising efforts, if you can create a simple enough environment by limiting or normalizing for externalities, then the analysis becomes easier to distill into why things happen rather than just what happened.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Benny Blum
Contributor
Benny Blum is the Vice President of Performance Marketing & Analytics at sellpoints, the first online sales orchestrator, and is based in the San Francisco bay area.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.