Web marketers note higher conversion rates with ads viewed on multiple sites

I thought this article from MediaBuyerPlanner was pretty interesting, even though it's focused on web marketing. As the graph clearly illustrates, conversion rates for banner ads are much better for customers who have viewed the ad (or multiple complementary ads from the same advertiser) on multiple sites. In fact, "Consumers reached across multiple publishers were twice as likely to convert as those reached only on a single publisher." That's pretty remarkable, and goes back to the old argument that reach and frequency do still have some place on the 'Net.

One wonders if this same effect has been noted out-of-home, either on newfangled digital signage networks, or else even old-school poster and POP display marketing. I know that a lot of our customers continually experiment, going back and forth between partitioning their networks to target only products in the immediate vicinity versus running run-of-site spots that appear on all screens in a store, regardless of location. While the former method really takes advantage of the target-specificity that digital signage systems offer, the latter might be a good idea if in-store shoppers turn out to behave much like the online shoppers measured in the chart above.

Of course, to buy into the theory of multiple exposures in-store, we'd also have to decide what constitutes a "site." Online it's pretty easy, with marketers dividing either by the page view, or the domain. In-store, we'd have to research if there was some amount of square footage that needed to be traversed before a shopper found himself in a new site, or whether there needed to be some notable change in environment (either via furnishings, personnel, or products on display). Then you'd need some newfangled tracking equipment to determine how many "impressions" a given shopper was exposed to, and compare that against purchase trends for products advertised locally versus those advertised across the entire venue. I suppose that traffic pattern data could be used as a proxy for more detailed tracking data, but even without that added bit of uncertainty this whole concept seems pretty fuzzy from a tracking perspective to me.

Tags: digital signage, retail media, out-of-home advertising