Marketers Find Search Ads Pay Off Beyond Online Sales

As marketers realize that consumers use search at all levels of the buying cycle, they are starting to use search ads to drive store visits and brand awareness, while integrating those campaigns with their traditional marketing efforts. Marketers spent $4 billion on search listings last year, mainly to drive direct online sales. But some, like General Motors, Toshiba and IBM, are measuring their search campaigns beyond pure direct-marketing goals and are taking into account its positive influence on increasing brand awareness and product consideration, which may result in later sales."Advertisers are starting to realize there's not only a direct-response opportunity but a reach opportunity," said Patrick Keane, director of sales strategy at Google. This expanded view of search will lead to its eventual tight integration with online and offline advertising, predicted Ted Meisel, senior vice president at Yahoo! and head of its Overture search division. "Clients are asking for it to be part of the marketing mix," he said. Take Select Comfort, a Minneapolis-based mattress manufacturer. It has learned that, though many customers want to try a mattress in the store before buying, they often turn to the Internet for research. So, Select Comfort uses search marketing to drive visits to its retail Web site, but also to its 370 stores and its call center. To measure activity at the top of the sales funnel, Select Comfort also tracks visitors that price beds, request more information, and view multiple pages.Select Comfort recently tied its search campaign with TV ads it ran to promote a President's Day sale by boosting search advertising. The payoff nearly doubled the return on marketing, and resulted in a 120 percent increase in call center revenue."We found out we were missing a good portion of our sales," said Carol Ott, senior marketing manager of e-commerce. For instance, Select Comfort saw bidding on higher-priced generic keywords like "beds" resulted in more call center activity from users. This approach is backed by research sponsored by search engines. According to a study done by ComScore Media Metrix for Yahoo!, 92 percent of purchases made after searches for consumer electronics happened offline. Tying store sales to search activity can be difficult, said Ron Belanger, vice president of search marketing at Carat Interactive. "Search, for better or worse, is going to need to be less measurable than it has been historically," he said. Paying high rates for listings at the top of search results pages can build brand awareness, Belanger said, even though this is harder to quantify than sales.Harrison Magun, managing director of aQuantive's Avenue A/Razorfish Search, warned that tracking sales activity remains essential, even as search is used for broader marketing goals. "If you can't measure it and track it," he said, "we don't think anybody should have any business spending money on it."For the past year, Avenue A/Razorfish Search has used proxy values to account for responses other than making a purchase, such as downloading white papers or watching a product video. It also urges marketers to take into account the lifetime value of customers when gauging their search campaigns.Search campaigns can integrate with traditional advertising. General Motors' Cadillac tied its search campaign to its Super Bowl efforts. After running two spots, Cadillac's Google ad impressions that day and the next doubled compared to a week earlier, and Cadillac drew 170 percent more visitors to its site through search ads. "It used to be a non-traditional tool for getting information. Now it's mainstream," said Tom Hassett, advertising manager at Cadillac, which plans to up its search ad spending 1000 percent this year.Other marketers are using search advertising to capitalize on celebrity sponsorships. Jenny Craig bought 75 keyword listings related to its new spokeswoman Kirstie Alley and her new Fat Actress sitcom. The search ads, which lead to a blog Alley writes about her quest to lose weight, have increased Web site registrations 80 percent since the campaign began in late December. Magun believes such integration will become more common. "Search does not belong in a silo," he said. "It belongs as part of the digital marketing strategy."

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Marketers Find Search Ads Pay Off Beyond Online Sales

Brian Morrissey

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