History has proven companies that maintain or increase their advertising investments in periods of economic downturns increase their sales and share of market, both during and after the downturn.

The Value of Advertising
When the economy constricts everyone pulls those purse strings tight.  The company that is putting their message out there builds brand and the perception that the company is powerful because they have the resources to advertise when others do not.  If during an economic downturn you maintain a strong advertising presence while your competitor cuts his budget, you will automatically increase your “Share of Mind.”

According to American Business Media advertising reinforces the power of branding and provides a show of stability.

Here are the facts
• Advertising during a recession protects market position.
• Maintaining “Share of Mind” costs much less than rebuilding it later on.
• Consistant advertising sustains brand recognition.
• Recessions reward the aggressive and penalize the timid.
• When times are good, you should advertise; when times are bad, you must.
• Recession advertising should be regarded as a driver of profits, not a drain

Goal: Demonstrate an increase in targeted visitors to travel offer/agent landing pages. Increase deep-link page views on client’s website and increase sign-up requests for travel agent assistance.

Focus: Increase reach & brand-awareness while reducing advertising & lead acquisition costs.

Target Audience: Leisure Travel, Finance, Luxury, Family Planner

Strategy: Our account management team worked closely with the client to identify their ideal audience. We developed the overall plan and aligned the products and messaging with their target markets. The plan utilized a series of specific targeting segments for the given audiences.

Results: The campaign received a tremendous amount of traffic and acquisition costs were slashed. BTMedia utilized dynamic CPM pricing, audience segments, and targeting technologies to maximize our client’s ROI. The dramatic increase in traffic was a result of our client’s offers being served to a receptive and engaged audience. Higher engagement resulted in reduced cost and higher ROI.

Many advertisers primarily use conversion percentage to measure the success of their display ads and search keywords. For example, if a display ad converts poorly (it has a low conversion percentage) then the advertiser typically lowers the budget for the ad, shifts the budget to another channel like search, or pulls the budget entirely.

The problem with only using the conversion metric method is that it is a “last click” metric. “Last click” means that the ad only gets credit for the last click the visitor made before they converted.

For display ad and search keyword purposes, a last-click model doesn’t reveal the true value of the ad. For example, a display or search ad wouldn’t get the credit for driving conversions to other campaigns. This can be a major issue, as advertisers might end up cutting the budget on an effective display campaign that is driving additional conversions, brand awareness and increased visitor traffic to your web site

Understanding the lift created in all channels is important to calculating display advertising ROI, and all marketers should consider adding display to their online budgets

The truth is that a combination of search and display ads returns the highest return-on-investment. When combined, search and display advertising deliver profoundly better results than when used independently.

A study sponsored by Yahoo! with comScore showed “a significant lift in on-site engagement and an increase in online and offline purchasing by consumers who are exposed to integrated campaigns that employ both types of online advertising.”

Third-party studies have shown that “users exposed to both search and display ads convert at a higher rate: an average of 22 percent better than search alone, and 400 percent better than display only.”

Recent research has been published showing the significant value of display advertising campaigns to the overall effectiveness of search marketing activities. Based on this research, the combination of a display and search campaign delivers substantial synergy, with the sales lift from the combined strategy being greater than the sum of the individual components.

What does this mean?  If an advertiser is only using search marketing to increase lift, they are leaving a large percentage of potential sales on the table.

• Visitation to the advertiser’s Web site
(lift of at least 46% over a four week period)
• Increased search queries for advertiser’s branded term
(a lift of at least 38% over a four week period)
• Consumers’ likelihood of buying the advertised brand online
(an average 27% lift in online sales)
• Consumers’ likelihood of buying at the advertiser’s retail store.
(an average lift of 17%)

Research also shows that online display advertising can have a substantial latency effect on consumers’ online behavior while also having the ability to drive increased traffic into retail stores, resulting in meaningful increases in offline sales.

Based on this research, it’s clear that understanding the lift created in all channels is important to calculating display advertising ROI, and all marketers should consider adding display to their online budgets

Source:comScore “Whither the Click”