Rocky Fu’s Blog

This press release from comScore about a study done by Yahoo and comStore shows interesting findings:

consumers exposed to online advertising tend to research or ‘pre-shop’ online prior to purchase, and this behavior ultimately leads to increased in-store sales. These highly-engaged ‘pre-shoppers’ spend an average of 41 percent more in-store when compared to consumers not exposed to online advertising.

This suggests that though the percentage of online retail sales is small, but the retailers should grab the opportunity to engage this audience of “pre-shoppers” through online marketing.

The following information are also valuable:

• Consumers exposed to online advertising are more engaged:
  Consumers exposed to display and/or search advertising viewed an average of six more pages during the period in which they were researching compared to those not exposed to advertising.
• Almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online advertising take place in-store:
  Consumers exposed to online advertising spent an incremental six dollars in-store for every one dollar spent online.
• Integrated search and display campaigns have maximum impact:
  Combined search and display ad campaigns resulted in deeper engagement for consumers exposed to those ads, leading to increased sales.

To provide integrated search and display campaigns is not an easy task. Google may be able to do this in the future as it has DoubleClick now. What if the advertisers need to run campaigns across different search engines? Good question. Then, we need a tool which is able to track all search engine campaigns, SEO, and maybe display ads as well.

Here is the “Research online, buy offline” report link.

Related Posts:

• Deep Insights Into Behavior of Chinese Online Consumers
• Average Chinese Apparel Shoppers V.S. Young Adults
• Googlers Deciphering Trends In Mobile Search
• Update on Chinese Consumers Research from McKinsey
• 5 Tips to Track And Integrate Offline Marketing Campaigns