3 Ways Search Can Boost Display

Brought to you by Mark Simon

From new technologies to old methodologies, your display and search campaigns interact in myriad ways (whether you like it or not). How should marketers best take advantage of these synergies?

I'll offer just a few answers to that question here.

Buy display traffic like search traffic
Display ad platforms are increasingly behaving like search ad platforms. That's largely a byproduct of the fact that display ad networks such as Google's DoubleClick Exchange and Yahoo's Right Media are using automated bidding to sell display ads. Given the success of automated bidding in search, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the display networks (especially those owned by search-heavy companies) would try to repeat search marketing's success with automated ad buying.

Non-engine players are entering the field as well. My own company is one example: Didit took its search advertising platform, which constantly roves the major search engines for the best search ad buying opportunities, and applied the same principles to its new display advertising platform, which constantly roves the major display exchanges for the best display ad buying opportunities. MediaMath, another advertising technology firm, is doing some great stuff in this space as well.

In effect, search network technology is driving display network technology, which is driving display technology on the advertiser side. The moral here for advertisers is that if you want to stay ahead of the competition in search or display, you'll really need to have a firm hand on the cutting edge of both channels.

Buy display traffic with search traffic
As far back as 2005, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote about the "slow tail" -- the substantial group of site visitors who arrive at a site but don't make a final purchase on the site for days or even weeks. (I'd guess that the slow tail is particularly slow for high-ticket items, and just about anything dealing with B2B.)

The slow tail means there's a set of site visitors who ought to be converting now, but aren't. Before these people return to your site, they could easily be poached by your competitors. They could also simply forget to ever return. Add to the slow tail the group of site visitors who came close to deciding to buy but decided against it at the last moment, and you're looking at rather large pay-per-click costs spent on visitors who ought to be converting but are instead slipping away.

Enter search-based behavioral retargeting. Advertisers put cookies on the PCs of people who have come to their websites via a search, which lets them follow these same people across the internet with display ads to draw them back to the website. Once these former visitors return to the advertiser's site, there's a good chance they'll reconsider the initial abandonment, and they'll finally convert.

Targeting users based on search visits makes particularly good sense, because people who click on your search ad have identified themselves as people who are not only within your target market, but were interested enough in your product or service to run a search for what you sell. They're therefore likely to be interested in you, even if they haven't converted yet.

If you're smart, you'll focus most of your retargeting dollars on the real near-successes of web traffic: search visitors who've begun to fill a shopping cart, looked through a bunch of pages on your site, or who otherwise showed a level of engagement beyond just landing on your site and clicking a back button.

The key takeaway here for marketers: If you're using display advertising effectively, it can make your search marketing a lot more successful.

Buy search traffic with display traffic
Since display ads make advertisers' brands top-of-mind, people exposed to these ads are more likely to search for the advertiser's brand, rather than for generic terms, when they're looking for the products and services that matter to them. When consumers run searches on generic terms, they're also more likely to click on the advertiser's search ads over a competitor's. (This is based on both Didit's experience and industry benchmarks.)

This search impact exists with most "push" advertising channels, which is why brand-relevant search activity increases whenever an advertiser gets a press mention, runs a TV spot, or launches a print campaign.

But because display advertising is online, there are powerful opportunities for understanding search/display attribution using either click-through or view-through metrics. Display ads don't just drive traffic to the search engines. They also tell a clear story of who they're driving to search traffic, and how. Advertisers who listen to that data story will be in a good position to optimize their display-to-search traffic flow and reap the rewards.

The overall lesson here is simple: Search and display advertising impact one another, on every level. Because that's so, if you want to understand how to make the best use of your display advertising, your starting point should be the same starting point you use to understand everything else: search.

Mark Simon is VP of industry relations at Didit.