• by David Zinman , December 10, 2010

So I'm sitting next to the lead viola player in a hotel ballroom, while an orchestra is playing. World-class conductor Roger Nierenberg has seated attendees at a presentation for business leaders which I'm attending with the orchestra to make a point. He directs the musicians to play the piece 5% off. The resulting cacophony powerfully drove home one point: all parts need to work together as part of a larger vision to reach any effort's full potential. If they don't work together perfectly, it's chaos.

Now, think about your search and display ad budgets. More than likely, they are separate, uncoordinated budgets. They don't practice or perform together (i.e., planned and bought), and they certainly aren't listened to or critiqued (i.e., measured or optimized) at the same time. The discordant results are an unfortunate and potentially wasteful outcome.

The evidence for display influencing search results is overwhelming. The 2009 Retail Reconnaissance study, which measured other kinds of actions that consumers took beyond clicks, found that there was a 59% increase in purchases when users searched for retailers after being exposed to display advertising. In effect, display ads result in significant increases in related brand-term searches, including the brand's name, company, or product. Aligning search and display, therefore, maximizes a campaign's effectiveness by creating a single online advertising experience for users. Think guns and butter. Wouldn't you allocate your spend differently if you knew the true impact of each channel?

For example, GM recently bought a series of full-screen ads to showcase Chevrolet's new models. These ads maximized the branding power of the creative canvas while offering tremendous scale. And although the format is online, clicks on the ad itself were not the point. The question was whether the ad could drive online behaviors that mattered. Should GM give all the sales credit they can measure to the search campaigns that generated the clicks on those days? It ended up looking deeper and determined that on the days when it ran this ad unit, it resulted in a 22% increase in Chevrolet dealer price requests and 4.3 more times the number of Chevrolet brand-related searches. Or consider Quaker Oats, which found that online exposure led to better awareness and more intent to buy online through a display campaign, which led to an increase in search volume on brand terms of 28% and 21% in two days, respectively.

Tips for Making Sweet Music

When marketers limit their campaigns to one form of online advertising, they are limiting the effectiveness of their efforts. To better integrate them, marketers should consider these five tips from inception to execution of their campaigns:

1. Work with agencies experienced in implementing campaigns which utilize both search and display

2. Develop a full funnel attribution model that considers all the influences on consumer behavior

3. Regularly monitor the performance of search and display elements and adjust as needed based on consumer behavior

4. Use both search and display as part of any initiative and regularly review results to determine the optimal mix

5. Make use of the technological capabilities offered by agencies and vendors to implement effective search and display campaigns

Adding display to a search campaign enables savvy marketers to make use of a fuller and more creative canvas for connecting with their customers about a brand, product or service, moving them through each stage of the funnel. When the unique benefits of search and display are brought together as part of a cohesive and comprehensive campaign, you can make beautiful music. As Nierenberg wrote in his book Maestro: "...a strong vision can lead people away from focusing on their part alone toward being aware of the whole."