According to a new
study by comScore, conducted with ValueClick Media, retargeting, among six different placement strategies, generated the highest lift in trademark search behavior at 1,046%. Despite this considerable
lift, the impact of retargeting is limited by its low relative reach, notes the report.
The study analyzed 103 campaigns from 39 different advertisers covering 7 industries, examining
the lift in brand website visitation and trademark search queries across six different media placement strategies:
- Audience Targeting - Ads served based on online
behavioral data, such as a past interest or interaction with a related product
- Contextual Targeting - Ads served to related page-level content
- Efficiency
Pricing - Cost-per-click engagement with creative
- Premium Pricing - High visibility placements on premium publishers
- Retargeting - Served to
users that have previously visited an advertiser's site
- Run-of-Network (RON) - Ads which appear anywhere in the network, often optimized by conversion
Among the six different placement strategies, Retargeting generated the highest lift in trademark search behavior at 1,046%. On the other end of the lift spectrum, efficiency generated the lowest
lift in trademark search behavior at 100%. However, it had the third-highest reach index score and second-lowest cost index score.
Run-of-network strategy offered the highest reach index
score. However, its lift was the second lowest at 126%, although its cost index score was lowest. The contextual and premium online targeting strategies had cost index scores close to three times as
high as the third-most costly strategy, retargeting. Contextual was slightly more costly than premium, with a cost index score of 1473 compared
to 1471.
Lift in Trademark Search Within 4 Weeks of Exposure (Total U.S., Home/Work/University Locations) |
Placement Strategy | Lift | Reach Index | Cost Index |
Retargeting | 1,046% | 30 | 373 |
Audience | 514% | 30 | 329 |
Premium | 300% | 21 | 1471 |
Contextual | 130% | 73 | 1473
|
RON | 126% | 100 | 100 |
Efficiency | 100% | 57 | 140 |
Source: comScore, September 2010 (Reach Index = Avg. Reach of Strategy/Avg.
Reach of RON x 100; Cost Index = Avg. Cost of Strategy/Avg. Cost of RON x 100) |
While Premium and Contextual placements are the most expensive
strategies, the advantage of Premium is the higher average lift (300%), while Contextual has the ability to reach substantially larger audiences (Reach Index of 73, second only to RON). RON and
Efficiency are both high-reach, low-cost strategies, but their lift performance lags that of the other strategies.
Anne Hunter, comScore vice president of Advertising Effectiveness, says
"... This study illuminates the differences in... various placement strategies... Each... must be understood in the context of the campaign's overarching objectives... with accurate
information on performance, marketers can truly optimize their advertising campaigns... "
Several campaigns in which three or more placement strategies were deployed showed a tendency to
disproportionately outperform the norm on at least one dimension of performance. A major pharmaceutical campaign which deployed five out of the six placement methods studied, resulted in visitors who
had seen the campaign spending seven times the average number of minutes on the client's site compared to the norm. Other campaigns showed similarly high lifts vs. the norm.
Al Muzaurieta,
co-founder and president of Good Apple Digital, said "This validates our use of multiple display advertising strategies, but more importantly it sets forth a benchmark for future normative
studies to quantify what display strategies are best to deploy for different categories and marketing objectives."
To download a copy of the white paper, please visit comScore here.