In today’s performance-focused ad market, CPC, CPE and CPA pricing models have dominated as marketers have striven to justify ad spend in a down economy. Display’s value in promoting brand awareness and presence has been something advertisers have invested relatively little lately; better to focus spend on consumers further in the sales cycle, instead of casting such a wide net.

However, recent research released by iProspect suggests that advertisers shouldn’t dismiss the value of those visitors who view a display ad but don’t click: many of them will still be impacted enough to actively search for more information on their own.

For those respondents who said they had seen display ads over the past 6 months:

• 31% said they had clicked on a display ad
• 37% said they hadn’t done anything
• 27% said they had done a search on the company, brand, or product

I have to admit personally that I fall into the third category. Often because I don’t want to disrupt my browsing experience, or because I want to know about the company before looking at a specific promotion, I’ve made a mental note about an intriguing product or ad and searched later. I’m currently in the market for a new car, but don’t want to see a flashy splash page for a car I hadn’t thought about—but I do want to learn more about it.

If advertisers can believe that CTR doesn’t capture the full value of a specific online display campaign, how can they measure its impact? Considerably difficult, but such is the case when advertising to early prospects no matter what the medium. Brand awareness studies are probably the best indicator of a campaign’s effectiveness at lining up future potential customers.

Advertisers might also be interested to know that display advertising working in concert with performance-based ads tend to boost the effectiveness of the latter. A few days after I saw an ad for the VW Rabbit, I filled out a lead form on Autobytel to get a quote from a dealer; I never clicked on the ad.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 12:54 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.