What Role Will Display Advertising Play In Your 2009 Marketing Plan?

November 24th, 2008

Many companies are slashing their marketing budgets and evaluating how marketing dollars are spent due to the tough economic times.  Slashing budgets is a clear sign that “Lean and Mean” is the current theme for many businesses. On average most research suggests that (while growing) online advertising still only represents less than 10% of where marketing dollars are spent. Yet even online advertising budgets are getting scrutinized.

For advertisers who wish to get the best ROI (Return On Investment) for their online marketing dollar the focus tends to shift to display advertising and whether or not they should keep spending in that category. We all know that display advertising (eg banner ads on websites bought on CPM or cost per thousand impressions) is typically the hardest online advertising initiative to measure. Comparatively, CPA (cost per acquisition) campaigns can be directly tied to ROI.

Therefore, when under pressure to justify every marketing dollar spent the inclination is to slash display advertising budgets and increase more accountable marketing channels such as affiliate marketing. At the surface this seems to make sense. However, if you take a holistic approach to looking at this situation you may find that display advertising plays an important role.

At NETexponent we have seen how display advertising can boost other online marketing efforts such as paid search and affiliate programs. We evaluate all marketing channels in order to get a holistic view of our clients’ online marketing effort. This outlook has shown us time and time again that spikes and dips in performance driven marketing channels such as search and affiliate can sometimes be directly related to display advertising efforts. When significant display advertising campaigns are running for clients we usually see a boost in traffic and conversions in other online marketing channels. Therefore, display advertising can play an important role even in ROI focused advertising efforts.

Measuring the impact of display advertising on other media channels and choosing the right allocation of marketing dollars is where the tricky part comes in to play. I am not advocating that all advertisers go out and boost display ad spending because it may not have the impact they want. It is true that even boosts in performance related to display could come at a price that is too high for advertisers.  My main point is that companies should evaluate the impact display advertising has on other online campaigns and use that data to determine exactly how much spend to allocate to this channel in order to maximize online marketing ROI.

Posted in Display Advertising, Meet Us, NETexponent Clients, Online Marketing, Research by Peter Figueredo | | 2 Comments

Google Launches Media Planning Platform

June 24th, 2008

Google has moved one step closer to integrating full display media buying capabilities with yesterday’s announcement of Google Ad Planner.  Right now this is a bare bones research tool that you have to export into a more robust tool like Doubleclick MediaVisor in order to do a complete media buy but one has to believe this is only the first step in what will be a much bigger piece of Google’s business moving forward.

Google invested $3.1 billion dollars in the acquisition of DoubleClick and while I don’t normally make predictions for this sort of thing I think there are some interesting things we might expect to see in the next 12 months as a results of this deal:

• Free ad serving - just like they bought Urchin and gave away the analytics, one can easily see the value in giving away ad serving in order to get the advertiser adoption and data that Google wants.
• Free media planning and buying tools - Ad Planner is the first step, but real agency media buyers need a complete end to end solution.  I expect Google will give this away as well in order to drive more online ad buying through their network.
• Integrated data / order attribution - Right now customers are hitting multiple advertising touch points such as display, search, affiliate, etc and marketers have the challenge of properly crediting each channel with their “share” of the order.  DoubleClick already has this technology and I would expect this to be integrated into Google Analytics at some point soon.
• Behavioral targeting capabilities - This will be a tricky one.  Google now sits in the middle of a massive amount of data and would have the ability to serve ads based on past search and browsing habits.  There will definitely be privacy concerns and although the value to advertisers would be great, the consumer backlash could be a big problem.

Posted in Display Advertising, Online Marketing, Research by Chris Kramer | | 0 Comments