Online Advertising Affects Offline Sales

comScore released on Monday results of a study they and Yahoo! conducted of 5 major online retailers with offline store presence.

Article Stats:

• People exposed to both search and display advertising spent 41% more in stores than those who saw neither ad.
• People exposed only to search advertising spent 26% more in stores than those who saw neither ad.
• People exposed only to display ads spent 11% more in stores than those who saw neither ad.
• 89% of consumers shop for information about products online.
• Less than 7% of all sales happen online.
• Almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online advertising take place in-store.
• For every dollar spent online resulting from an advertising campaign, five more were spent by the same group of people in the store.

Why This May Not Directly Relate to You:

The study watched activities and sales of five major retailers. The announcement didn’t mention them by name, but the types were three national department stores, a major apparel retailer, and an office products supplier.

Due to the type of companies, the information may not directly apply to you. The companies in the survey probably have a strong Internet presence. They also can afford to put on large advertising campaigns and provided excellent and clear landing pages and cross-promotions on their own sites. The study also focused on consumers who were spending a bit of time researching products they were thinking of buying.

When putting together an advertising campaign, information on your products needs to be full, complete, and consistent from the ad to the point where the buy process begins. Those elements plus the ability for customers to pickup the product at a location nearby will help produce the results described in the article. Therefore, it’s not just placing the ad that makes a difference, but everything else in-between.

But what if you don’t have retail stores and you only produce the products other retail stores sell? Focus on providing all the right information on the products and then display the retailers near them that sell the product. Although you may also offer an online buying option, you can be confident that significantly more people will choose an offline option than who buy from you.

Conclusion:

Click-throughs are just as important as they always have been. Therefore, this study doesn’t replace the need for targeted advertising. This simply shows that our advertising programs may be significantly more successful if we can make it easy for people to find an offline location near them to pick it up.

References:

• comScore: Yahoo! and comScore Study Finds Online Consumers Who Pre-Shop on the Web Spend More In-Store
• eMarketer: Search and Display Work Better Together