Last week, Ad Week reported on an interesting study involving TV and online traffic. According to Integrated Media Management (IMMI) more people go online and watch TV in tandem later in the week than do so earlier. While I’m not entirely convinced by the methodology behind their findings there were two points that I thought were important from a search marketing perspective.
Timing is everything
The effectiveness of certain keywords and search advertising copy can vary depending on time of day, day of the week, and even seasonally. It’s vitally important to constantly monitor the effectiveness of your campaign and to look for patterns that can help tease out meaning and lead to better campaign optimization. An obvious example would be for a nationwide network of florists who have holiday themed traffic (Mother’s Day, Boss’s Day), summertime traffic driven by weddings, and even weekend traffic driven by dating.
TV creates its own timing
Television continues to be a phenomenal driver of traffic, as we saw in our Super Bowl Scorecard. An interesting tidbit within the IMMI study leaves some room for debate: 8.2 percent of people watching cable television did so while online and 11 percent of people watching network television did so while online. Two interpretations of this are that broadcast tends to have more commercials breaks which afford users time to shift their focus to another screen, or, broadcast networks tend to aggressively promote their online platforms more than cable. IMMI pushes the latter interpretation but there isn’t enough public data to bear this out.
What we have seen from our own campaigns is that integration with television advertising leads to a noticeable effect on search traffic around terms related to the television ad. Smart brands know to integrate their television ad buys and flights with their search campaigns so that they can be ready to catch the traffic in the right time and the right place.
The recessionary wrinkle is that many brands are trying to save money by buying TV spots on a targeted local basis. What they may not realize is that they can geo and time-target their search ad campaigns as well so that the right keywords and copy are running at the right time.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
