January 2010 – Online Insights: Viewpoint

Use Display Ads To Get More Out of Search

If you’re advertising online, you’re probably paying for search clicks that don’t convert and display ads that don’t drive sales. To solve both of these problems, find a way to make your search and display ads work better together.

I’m speaking specifically of search retargeting. Here’s how it works: after users search for a term that’s relevant to your business, they arrive at your site. But many searchers leave before ever converting. Historically, these visitors would have represented wasted clicks–end of story. But with retargeting, advertisers can drop a tracking cookie on the visitor’s computer and use this cookie to follow that visitor across the Internet. Consequently, advertisers can re-ignite the conversation with these former visitors, drawing them back to the advertiser’s site to finally drive a conversion.

This process increases the possibility that a conversion from a previously lost or abandoned click will occur. It also means driving display ad spend toward users who–through their search activity–have declared themselves as being interested in the kinds of things your company sells.

In addition to the ad agencies that offer retargeting services of various kinds, a number of ad networks offer systems with similar functionality. For example, Yahoo’s Smart Ads system dynamically targets ad offers to Yahoo users based on the activities they’ve performed across the entire Yahoo network.

So, for instance, a user who lives in Los Angeles, plays poker in Yahoo games, reads about poker in Yahoo sports and searches for flights to Las Vegas, is quite likely to be more than a casual Las Vegas searcher–he or she is probably a very serious candidate for receiving ads for flights to Sin City.

Yahoo might serve this user ads with special offers on Los Angeles to Las Vegas flights and these ads might appear anywhere on the Yahoo network.

While different vendors offer different flavors of search retargeting, the common thread is clear: web users spend their lives across the entire Internet. To target them best and to make sure advertisers stay engaged with them, advertisers need to maintain conversations with them across as much of the web as possible–through display, search and the many consumer touchpoints that lie in between.

Mark Simon is vice president, industry relations at Didit, a digital ad firm specializing in search marketing and targeted display ads. He can be reached at mark.simon@didit.com.