Bench Media recently undertook a data-driven study to determine the impact of channel diversification on paid search and social campaigns by analysing custom data generated from The Trade Desk, a media buying platform built for the open internet.
Paid search and social advertising are stalwarts of the advertising playbook boosting conversion. Yet with media spends on the rise, increasing fragmentation of audiences, and competition across every channel, marketers face the challenge of creating new strategies to support their growth targets. Relying only on search and social campaigns can result in diminishing returns as competition and noise in these channels continue to increase. Hence, adopting digital branding is a powerful tool to source new customers and maximise budget efficiency.
Utilising The Trade Desk platform, Bench Media ran a targeted study with a range of brand channels across digital, audio and video, and the advertisers were drawn from retail, health and medical, education, gaming, electronics, travel, and software industries. The conversion types were not limited to one or two events and covered a range of actions, such as purchase, form submission, engagement and quotation submission.
Specifically, the uplift goals included: uplift in rate of qualified traffic engaging with website (engaged visitors), uplift in conversion rate of lead form submission (lead form or form), uplift in sales conversion rate (purchase).
The study looked at audiences that were exposed to two conversion paths and assessed their conversion rate uplift:
- search/social ad > conversion;
- programmatic ads across audio, display, video and BVOD > search /social ad > conversion.
The result showed that advertisers saw an uplift in conversion rate by up to 3000% and improved performance at the bottom of the funnel. It unequivocally demonstrated the merit and impact of combining the forces of branding channels and paid social and search.
In 2021, programmatic investment continued to climb, according to IAB’s annual industry study, and this spend is expected to continue across this year. It indicates marketers are increasingly seeing how programmatic provides an effective use of data and access to premium inventory at scale. The flexibility enables all brands to respond to market changes or results from new data, with cost-efficient, optimised ad spend.
