Integrate Search and Display Advertising to Boost ROI

By Paul M. Wilson

Making it Happen
Here are five tips to help you integrate your SEM and display advertising efforts.

1. Start with integrated planning. Think about what you're trying to accomplish with your marketing campaign. Often, marketers view display ads as a branding mechanism and SEM as a capture mechanism. Actually, each is more versatile and can be deployed in creative ways to help you achieve a unified marketing goal. When integrated effectively at the planning stage, they enable you to achieve greater overall ROI. Don't plan display and search campaigns in isolation. The key is to outline your overarching campaign goals, then align the specific display and search execution in a complementary workflow towards those goals.

2. Define your funnel coverage. When you set up your campaign, structure it to sufficiently cover the customer funnel. Cover the upper part of the funnel by driving awareness and expanding your reach via display ads, video ads, a content network and site targeting in a branding capacity. In parallel, test broader "head" terms in your search campaigns. Address the middle part of the funnel by supporting consideration through your search campaign, as well as through behavioral targeting and display retargeting. The lower part of the funnel focused on the purchase is best supported by a long-tail search campaign. Post-sale retention can be addressed through search and nonsearch retargeting campaigns.

3. Ensure a consistent user experience. Consistent messaging throughout an online marketing campaign typically produces higher conversion rates. To that end, make sure the theme of the search campaign is in line with the display campaign. Check that the messaging of the display campaign and the language used in the copy match the keywords you're buying for search. Make sure the keywords searched for will have appropriate creative and will lead to landing pages designed to guide searchers to their desired action. And close the circle by designing the landing pages of the search campaign to be aligned with those of the  display campaign.

4. Leverage search remarketing/retargeting. Google and Yahoo enable you to target defined audiences of searchers through follow-on display advertising, matching the ad to the searcher's expressed interests. This means you can advertise to people who've qualified themselves by conducting a search on keywords that matter to you. Search remarketing/retargeting enables you to target those who don't convert with appropriate offers, and to upsell/cross-sell those who do convert. With Google, you can target display ads at searchers who click on your search ads. With Yahoo, you can take it one step further by targeting searchers for whom your ads have merely appeared on the search engine results page.

5. Track and analyze across channels. Track across channels and analyze the results of your search and display campaigns holistically. Analysis of online marketing campaigns is often done in silos, but this can lead to misinformed decisions. For example, a display ad may not produce clickthroughs, yet may still play a critical role in influencing a purchase. Therefore, establishing attribution models to track search, display, direct navigation, email and other channels is critical to drawing the proper insights into what's actually working and how it fits into your broader marketing mix.

The Bottom Line
Integrating search and online display advertising campaigns will deliver more revenue than executing them separately. Marketers who fail to integrate the two aren't maximizing their potential revenue and are leaving money on the table. In today's economy, who can afford to do that?

Paul M. Wilson is chief revenue officer at search engine marketing firm iProspect (paul.wilson@iprospect.com).