World War D: Search vs. Display

The marketing war may no longer just be offline vs. online.  Today, competition prevails even between digital channels, with paid search and display media at the forefront.  A recent article from Business2Community that compares the channels first comments that search ads are growing at a much slower pace than that of display advertising (10% vs. 23%, respectively, in the US).  And despite video having strong engagement with consumers, banner ads will reach $14.74B in spending vs. $9.59B on video.  In future years, video is expected to grow at a faster pace.

The article comments that display advertising compares well to tv commercials offline, as search cannot compete with images, video and rich media.  Certainly, SEM plays a role in driving site traffic, but display and programmatic advertising can be pivotal to the marketing strategy.

Although it was a Forbes article from 2013, Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta also had a perspective on search vs. display influence and efficiency.  He comments on the fact that with much of advertising, results are hard to quantify, but with the web, companies can have concrete evidence of success metrics.  But Gupta goes on to say that not all digital marketing channels are made equal.  Display ads often have brand appeal, while search captures customers at the point of a purchase decision.  As a result, search often gets the credit.

There is industry belief that display plays a critical role at the top of the funnel, and this is just chalked up to the attribution problem.  But this can also lead to ad hoc management of marketing budgets.  Gupta also comments that experiments to test ad effectiveness can be helpful, but this doesn’t provide long-term measurement solutions.  His solution is just to watch the output from the channels over time.   

Gupta also collected data over time and developed an approach called ‘persistence modeling,’ which uses regression to isolate the effects of display vs. search advertising.  The results from this study showed that display media is effective in affecting the number of customers who eventually searched and became customers.  But he also found that search ads had a longer-term effect on purchase behavior than display media.  And because display forces budget for both media, it can be a more expensive channel overall. 

Net net – it’s obvious that both digital channels are important in the marketing mix, and marketers will need to leverage both art and science in their implementation.