• by December 19, 2000

Following yesterday's Minute about the primary reason for advertising online shifting away from sales generation to website traffic building and brand awareness, one of our readers wrote, "Companies may say that they are doing more Branding or traffic building but you have to look at the individual deals. The whole point of Internet has always been targeting to the group that is most likely to buy your product. There aren't nearly enough people in America to constitute a reason to do branding on the Internet."

Yes, some could argue that branding on the web is not as effective as other media - TV and Cable branding campaigns may be much cheaper (CPM wise) and may give advertisers a much greater return on investment - but as skeptical as we all have become, we have to admit there are ways to successfully brand on the web.

Avenue A yesterday released study findings that prove banner ads increase conversions, which include site visits, registrations or sales. The study concluded that a majority of those conversions are "Awareness Conversions," which come from customers who see an ad but don't click on it immediately, but rather visit, register or purchase later on the advertiser's website. The results confirm that viewing banner ads increases both brand awareness and a prospect's propensity to convert. Avenue A found that the client's online ad campaign was directly accountable for driving a 10% increase in conversions. The study also found that 80% of these conversions were from customers who did not click on banner ads, but rather converted later on the client's site. These "Awareness Conversions" are significant gains, especially for companies with a strong, established brand or those with substantial offline marketing spend. Does this mean every advertiser should launch a huge online branding effort? Of course not. First we need more research in this area. But as a concept, online branding already has some success stories worth considering under its belt. And if that's not enough, AdRelevance is rumored to be in the process of crunching numbers from their second big branding study, due out in mid-January, so more proof is on the way.