How Display Advertising, Search Marketing Are Connected

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

If you thought display advertising was dead online then here’s a study that might change your mind. The interesting thing is you can benefit through search with an effective display advertising plan. What do these figures really say?

The study shows that Internet users initially respond to the medium as follows: 31percent responds by directly clicking on an ad; 27 percent respond by searching for a product or brand on a search engine; 21 percent respond by typing the company Web address into their browser and visiting the website; and 9 percent respond by using social media. Overall, 52 percent of Internet users actively respond to display advertising.

Here’s the statistic worth noting: 27% searched for product by brand.

This illustrates how important branding really it. And it also illustrates how important it is for search and for how important it is to combine search with display advertising for more effective branding.

Do your display ads include your URL? They should. Do they provide a branding message that people will remember? They should.

This will likely lead to rewriting the book on best practices for display advertising. Among those best practices should be:

• Inclusion of the URL in your ad
• Using your ads to make your brand recognizable at a glance
• Use of keywords within the ad to make searching easier and more rewarding
• Keywords in your ads should be keywords for which you rank highly

From this point forward, think of display advertising and search marketing as complimentary tasks within your overall online and search engine marketing plan.