Comscore published a report on the effective payoff for varying display campaigns earlier this week.
Unlike many ad-research reports, Comscore reviewed a variety of campaigns and placement strategies from broad network buys, to re-targeting and behavioral targeting and how they impacted overall conversion.
Included in their analysis:
- Impact from a search perspective – did display formats drive post-impression activity?
- Life-time impact of conversion – did a responder not only visit the website, but did they become a customer and continue beyond the first purchase?
- Cost Performance - Relative cost/reach of each type of placement.
Findings:
Surprisingly, the contextual, optimized and behavioral strategies had similar results to run-of-network and other less ‘intelligent’ methods. However re-targeting had an average performance 200%-300% better than every other placement, but obviously is gated by reach (people are only re-targeted if they visited the site first – thus a smaller audience).
In my experience optimization can work well within a site, creating a contextual and meaningful interaction (think Netflix or Amazon) but less so for ad campaigns. Re-targeting can be very powerful for high-intent consumers who browsed and left or abandoned a cart. Behavioral can work, but I suspect the conditions are too variable campaign to campaign to be effectively measured in a study like this one.
Conclusions :
- While these finding’s aren’t applicable to every situation, they illustrate the diminishing returns on overly sophisticated display placements. In the end, intelligent media planning, mixed strategy and common-sense re-targeting garner the biggest payoffs.
- Search and post-impression continue to be undervalued but significant as a metric for behavior and campaign ROI.
