The Offline Impact of Online Ads

April 7, 2008 | By Marc Porcelli | No Comments »

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There was a blog posting in Mashable last night that discussed Magid Abraham’s (CEO of comScore) findings in a recent study. Abraham noted that “online campaigns increase sales more at advertisers’ retail cash registers than on their websites.” The report goes on to state that it is not that online sales did not increase due to advertising online, but offline sales saw larger gains. This information should be particularly appealing for advertisers who are in the process of transitioning offline spend into into online.

There is a great graph that appears in The Harvard Business Review The results of this graph were commentated on, noting that “Results from 18 studies in the finance, travel, telecommunications, and retail sectors collectively show that online ads have a powerful effect on off-line sales. Running search ads tends to be more effective than using display ads, and combining both types is more effective still.”

Clearly, the value of search ads yields a higher value than does banner advertising. This should be no surprise for any online advertiser. Search ads garner a higher value offline and online, perhaps Google or Yahoo! should have sponsored this comScore study.

The real value in this study is that it brings further validity to the online marketing space. The more these studies come out, the more credible the industry gets.