It’s a common budgeting conundrum for advertisers- where do we focus our ad spend? Farhad Divecha, director of AccuraCast, weighs up the relative merits of display versus search advertising, and what factors should inform a decision on where to spend your budget.
One of the Internet’s greatest success stories is how much money is generated by online advertising. It’s spectacularly simple to throw cash at search and display ad campaigns, and it’s created a massive global industry – Google alone chipped in with revenues of $29.32bn last year, around 10% of that coming from the UK.
This causes a lot of head scratching among many businesses, raising some big, yet basic questions. ”Where should ad spend be focused?” is right up there for everyone except those with the biggest budgets. The starting point for most of us is the ad service offered by Google, particularly on their search and display networks. When wielded correctly, both can be extremely powerful tools to grow traffic and build a brand.
Display Advertising – The Ugly Step Sister
Display ads, where you buy contextual or specifically targeted ad placements on Google’s partner sites, have historically been the poor relation to search campaigns, having developed something of a bad reputation in their earlier days due to click fraud and low click-through and conversion rates.
Google has evolved their display service a lot since these early days, and simple things such as separate bidding for search versus display, and tools such as display ad creator, placement tool, ad planner and CPA bidding have helped make a much better case for running display campaigns.
Should You Invest In Search Or Display?
What should inform your choice of where to allocate your spend? In an ideal situation businesses should use a combination of search and display; display to build awareness of the product / service and branding and search to get sales. Marketers should understand their target users’ mindset when advertising on each network, and should therefore bid and budget accordingly.
There are situations, though, where search or display might need to be used exclusively. Display advertising should not normally be the first priority where companies are selling a well-known product or service and have limited budgets and are not able to max out the potential search spend. The reason behind this is simple: Search ads cater to an immediate demand. Users who are searching for something are more ready to act or make a purchase than those who are idly browsing for information.
Conversely, there are situations where search advertising might not be the ideal route, most commonly with new products or services where there is no knowledge about the product / service in the market and so display ads are needed to build awareness. In such a situation, search volumes might either be really low or even non-existent. Display advertising can be used to build up awareness and demand for these products or services.
To illustrate the point, consider the case of Salop Leisure -organisers of the largest show for caravan enthusiasts in the Midlands and Wales. To drive ticket downloads for the event they implemented a search and display advertising campaign. The display campaigns were designed to raise awareness of the event whereas the search campaigns targeted users who were actively searching for caravans. The graphs below show that the impressions were surprisingly higher for search, largely due to the highly targeted display ad placements, but even more surprisingly, the conversion rates were much higher on the display campaigns.
This case clearly highlights how search and display can be made to work hand in hand so long as the advertiser clearly understands the user intent on each network and targets the users accordingly.
By Farhad Divecha
Director
AccuraCast
www.accuracast.com/
