Eyeblaster released a research note -  “Search and Display: Reach beyond the keyword” (get it here).   It’s a brief note with very interesting findings, particularly for display folks.  Using Eyeblaster’s proprietary “Channel Connect for Search” (CC4S) product, Eyeblaster tracked cross-channel campaigns and determined the source of the conversion.

The note starts with a really good overview of the purchase funnel as it pertains to display and search (using a very relevant analogy to the yellow pages).   The funnel diagram shows how display and search can impact the funnel.  In the diagram, Display is shown to drive the entire funnel from Awareness to Intent to Purchase while Search only drives Consideration and Intent.   I’d suggest that Search can and does influence “Favorability”.  Once a consumer is aware of the need, she will search for generic, higher-level terms, and search can show ads that will drive brand favorability.  For example, I might search for “BlueRay DVD player” and could then see a search ad for LG and view LG DVD players favorably.  Additionally, while it isn’t clear if they mean this in the diagram, display is proven to drive repeat purchase (via retargeting).  Search is unable to directly drive repeat purchase.

As to the results of Eyeblaster’s study, it was found that:

“Overall, for customers who used both search and display, 72% of conversions arrived as a direct result of the displaychannel. Only 23% of the conversions were a direct result of the search channel. 5% were the result of display ads that were followed by a search.”

Eyeblaster caveats that the share of display vs search is “the result of  budget allocation decisions made by the advertisers.”   It’s probably safe to assume that Eyeblaster clients lean a bit more towards display than search, particularly those using CC4S.  The extremely low number of “search after display” conversions differs pretty dramatically from prior studies I’ve seen, which I believe has to be due to the types of campaigns being used in the study.

The report then digs into the share of display and search conversions by vertical. This is great data and you can see a wide variety in share by industry vertical.  Entertainment, CPG, Financial and Careers lean far more towards display while B2B, Travel and Retail skew towards search.  I’m actually surprised to see careers sitting more towards the display side, since jobs seems like a much more search-driven category, but the data tells a different story.

What would be really interesting here, given Eyeblaster’s leadership position in driving display engagement, is to get a sense of the breakout of display conversions by attribution type.  How are these display conversions being attributed?  It would be great to break these conversions out into post-view, post-click and even post-engagement.  I’m petitioning for a follow-up Research Note.

The key takeaway here is that display is an extremely important part of any marketing plan and can drive conversions on its own.  We in display intuitively know that and evangelize it every day, but it’s great to see a study from an industry leader showing some numbers to back it up.  Next step is to dig even further into these numbers and really nail the point home.

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Could there be any more compelling case that display drives search than the fact that Google is running display ads to drive to Youtube videos about Google’s search capabilities?

The videos are on Youtube here – http://www.youtube.com/searchstories

John Battelle first talked about this in his SearchBlog.

Most relevant here is that Battelle saw Google doing roadblocks on nytimes.com.  He states:

“It’s truly a brand campaign: Google is not selling anything here other than its own brand – that ephemeral sensibility that resides between its customers’ ears.”

Now we know that every campaign, even a “brand” campaign, has a goal.  So what’s the goal here?  How would the dominant search engine with 65% market share in the US measure and evaluate success?

Since I haven’t seen screenshots of the display ads, I can’t evaluate if there is a chance the display ads could drive view-based activity (vs. focusing solely on driving clicks).  But the primary video on the youtube site , called “Parisian Love”, has nearly 700K video plays in two months.  I am no expert on how many video plays is impressive, but that seems like a pretty good number.  Side note – these videos are pretty cool – I’m immersed in the space and I find them compelling yet I could see my mom or sister also finding them interesing and informative – nice job!

It’s interesting to think of the way Google could have used data to drive results in this campaign.  First, assuming the goal is to increase search share, and in an interesting case of reverse retargeting, they could have simply cookied their own searchers and either excluded people who either never or rarely searched on Google.  They could also have cookied people who didn’t search in an optimal manner (these videos do a good job of demonstrating the lifecycle of searching for things and coming to solution) or those who didn’t seem to find what they needed.  Finally, while they could never do this because they “do no evil”, they could have cookied people who have the Google toolbar but searched on Bing.

Regardless of how they are measuring success – this campaign is the ultimate example of using display to drive search.  If the master of search is using display to drive search, who are you to argue? Thanks Google.

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Took a break from blogging to welcome a new addition to the family.  Little Jackson, our newborn son, is doing very well and, as you can see, has a very excited big sister.

I hope to get back to a more semi-regular schedule with the blog.

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The Rubicon Project unveiled the Rubicon 20 Index which should be a more accurate measure of display CPM prices.  Focusing on just 20 top sites should also allow for Rubicon to account and adjust for any oddities in the data.  I’m still not sure why it takes 2 months to release this data, but maybe the concentration on 20 sites will get this report out sooner going forward.

That said, like the financial markets, if the Rubicon 20 is the Dow then we’ll still need an S&P500 to account for the broader market.  Perhaps Pubmatic’s pricing report can fill that void.

As I suggested in a prior post, Rubicon also saw prices increase a great deal in Q2.  Download the report here .

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