• by Paul Pellman , November 10, 2011

As online retailers gear up for this holiday season, competition on the marketing front is already heating up. Top media-buying executives are readying plans to secure the best keywords for specific products, SKUs and industries.

But the savviest marketers understand that to make the most of their search marketing investments this year, they will need more than just deep pockets or keyword optimization. They’ll need a lot of help from the display advertising world.

Online retailers and marketers have recently come to more fully comprehend the important contributions that different advertising media channels, such as display, video and mobile, make to their search marketing investments. This includes the beneficial role that display advertising plays in boosting holiday search marketing performance. And it makes perfect sense.

Are consumers likely to buy from a retailer they’ve never heard of before? Will they be inspired to make a purchase based on a special offer without seeing a promotional ad? Probably not. But if consumers have seen a series of ads about a retailer when they narrow their search for the perfect holiday gift, they are more likely to select the recognized brand.

How important is display in making search marketing campaigns a success? Recent research has shown that display advertising lifts search conversions by 30% on average.

Retailers and online marketers can leverage the power of display to help make this one of their most successful holiday seasons yet. Here are three actions you can take to get started:

1. Display Re-Marketing – First, it’s important to re-engage with consumers who have purchased from you before. By re-marketing to them via display advertising, retailers can remind buyers they are ready to serve them. It’s also important for retailers to be extra aggressive in their re-marketing efforts. For example, expand your target audience beyond buyers to include past site visitors. Also, increase the frequency of your re-marketing campaigns and don’t forget to be creative. Serving the same ads over and over again will not help a retailer to get noticed. Change it up!

2. Pave the Way for New Customers – The most effective way for retailers to bring new customers through the conversion funnel is to tie together their search and display campaigns. Research has shown that online marketers that take the time to build brand awareness via display advertising are more likely to get clicks on search ads (with a higher conversion rate) than marketers that haven’t.

It’s this double whammy of increased clicks and higher conversions that reinforces the value of display. But it’s equally important to be targeted with your brand-building activities. One way is by combining display ads with audience information from leading data providers like Nielsen and TARGUSinfo. 

These data providers offer invaluable demographic and psychographic information about specific online buyer segments. Retailers can use this data to ensure that display advertisements are reaching their ideal audiences. In addition, this rich audience data can be used in conjunction with Real Time Bidding sites to better target customers, while leveraging the cost-savings benefits RTBs provide.

3. Tap Attribution for Holistic Measurement – You also need to understand just how much to invest in display and search to maximize results. For retailers, display and search work together to drive performance. But online marketers have traditionally measured the performance of their display and search campaigns separately.

This outdated, siloed approach to measurement offers no insight into the assist that value display advertising provides in driving search results. In order to accurately understand the complex interactions between search and display and then make proper investment decisions, it’s essential to measure them holistically. 

The only way to accomplish this on the scale needed in today’s complex cross-channel marketing world is with attribution analysis. Using a series of sophisticated algorithms, attribution measurement identifies the influence each aspect of a combined display and search campaign has on overall performance. This includes pinpointing exactly what creative works best in each channel to drive optimal performance.

This holiday buying season, the online marketing game is more sophisticated and competitive than ever. But by taking a strategic approach to investing in and accurately measuring the performance of your cross-channel campaigns, your company will be positioned to reap the greatest of rewards.