• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 25, 2010

At least in the U.K., video and display advertising are effective at driving "significant uplift" in site visitation and advertiser search queries, according to a new study from .Fox Networks and comScore.

Commissioned by .Fox -- Fox International Channels' global online ad network -- the study relied on comScore's single-source panel methodology, and evaluated results from four campaigns across four industry sectors.

Over a four-week period, the average uplift across the campaigns saw site visitation increase by more than a factor of seven following exposure to an ad. Consumers, meanwhile, were three times more likely to conduct search queries using brand or relevant generic terms in the same time period.

What's more, when evaluating video and display side by side, consumers exposed to video advertising were 28% more likely to visit the brand site, and nearly twice as likely to conduct a trademark search.

"Confirming expectations and previous industry understanding, video was able to generate a more immediate impact in the first five exposures than display ads in terms of increases in site visitation and search queries," report the study's authors.

The study was compiled examining four campaigns conducted in 2009 across the Travel, Finance, Government and Utilities sectors. The campaigns used various combinations of video and display formats, and delivered a total of 300 million impressions to UK Web users.

"This research centers on consumer behavior proxies that are better placed to reflect communication goals, defining success based on a mix of visitation, engagement and search behavior across a four-week period," said Anthony Rhind, Global co-CEO of Havas Digital -- one of the agencies that sponsored the study.

"By addressing difficult planning considerations such as cross-format and multiple touchpoint attribution, this .Fox research better reflects the way Havas Digital believes campaigns must be evaluated," Rhind added.

The study compared the behavior of Web users who were exposed to the online campaigns with a control group of comScore panelists who were not exposed.

The control group was generated using a pair-wise matching process along a number of key demographic and behavioral variables.