Integrating Display and Search to Enhance Campaign Performance

Article highlights

• State of the industry
• The integration of SEM and Display Engine Marketing (DEM) yield best results
• Using audience data for effective targeting
• Bringing back lost prospects through Remarketing
• Marketers must should innovate

The online advertising ecosystem is becoming increasingly complex. As the industry evolves, audience data and innovative marketing technologies continue to play a more significant role in every marketing strategy. Serving relevant ads in real time across multiple platforms using highly measurable techniques is posing a huge challenge for many marketers. As result, success will be determined by the extent at which marketers are willing to innovate using integrated marketing techniques in their entire marketing mix. These challenges will require an aggressive hybrid approach, better knowledge of target audience and audience data generated from all campaign efforts. Furthermore, ROI oriented marketers can longer view search advertising as an independent entity for performance and display advertising for branding. The integration of SEM and DEM can significantly enhance performance, reach, and yield best results for every online campaign.

These changes call for more investment in technology and improved collaboration among the different parties actively involved in the online advertising landscape.

With an online population of 1.9 billion users and increasing, the online audience has become more sophisticated. Segmentation and efficient targeting is becoming a headache, especially for marketers who are slow to implement the needed technologies to accelerate this process.

Integration will define 2011 and beyond

Two heads are better than one! From a general perspective, this sounds logical. In digital marketing, it goes way beyond our imagination of the double impact and endless opportunities the integration of SEM and DEM can offer. The integration of display and search perfectly complement each other from the awareness stage all the way down the customer purchase funnel. When used in combination with search engine results, online display plays a key role in effectively producing a tremendously brand lift, irrespective of the user's response during the first ad exposure. An efficient integration of the two can produce a lift in the likelihood to purchase of over 50%. In order to be able to accurately determine returns on campaign spend, marketers must run display ads along with search ads as this approach yield the best results.
Nevertheless, for many advertisers, measuring the combined effect/results of an integrated platform still poses a huge challenge. A Display Engine Marketing Technology provider with expertise knowledge in digital marketing can efficiently fill in this gap.

Remarketing; thinking beyond the Click

Remarketing is a hybrid approach to efficiently improve marketers conversion rates by gaining back lost prospects who failed to convert during an initial visit to an advertiser's website. It enables a direct interaction between a brand and a prospect by adding tags to key pages on the advertiser's website. Users can be targeted with customized ads in real time as they browse elsewhere outside the boarders of the advertiser's website. With the help of innovative creatives, an optimized and dynamically tailored display ad will take the user back to a specific landing page in order to complete one of the advertiser's desired actions.

It is a 'must have' marketing strategy that will cut down campaign budget by targeting only effective impressions. With a significant cut in waste impressions, the optimization of ads will enhance overall campaign results in the entire marketing mix.

The new road to conversion using audience data

As a marketer, how do you capitalize on all the data at your reach?

Relevant data regarding prospects that could positively impact overall campaign ROI is generated with every single display and search impression served to an online user.
Advertisers won't necessarily need a third party audience data. Data generated from impressions and failed conversions have a high potential to bring back lost prospects that are already familiar with an advertisers brand or products. All this data can be used as a relevant source to effectively target and optimize ads than can provide unique user experience in real time.

The integration of search and display is greater than the sum of their parts. Are marketers ready to capitalize on it? Could there be a better time to place data and innovation at the forefront of online marketing strategies?