Large brands can benefit from adjusting their online advertising spending on a cyclical basis between display advertising — designed to build impressions and awareness — and PPC (define) campaigns that focus on conversion and ROI (define). This cyclical approach improves overall ROI.

This nugget emerged while I was talking about the world of search engine marketing with Dustin Engel, director of consumer strategy and research of Range Online Media, an agency that manages these types of campaigns for many large brands.

Two-Phase Cycle: Display and PPC

In the first phase of a cycle, the brand should ramp up display advertising spending, and temporarily suspend the lower ROI keywords in their PPC campaign to fund that increased spending. During this phase, the display ads should help enhance user awareness and consciousness of a brand, creating a greater willingness to respond to PPC ads when the time is right.

In the second phase of the cycle, the brand ramps down the display advertising spending, and ramps their PPC campaign back up to full speed. The PPC campaign leverages the brand awareness of the display campaign to increase the overall CTR (define) and conversion rates of the campaign.

Benefits of the Cyclical Approach

This type of cyclical approach provides the highest total ROI. For example, if you instead kept your PPC spending at a constant level, and ran a lower-level display advertising campaign, most of the time you wouldn’t achieve the same total ROI on your advertising investment.

In a related note, organic search is a stabilizer for your campaigns. Your spending on improving organic search results generally comes from the human and technology resources applied, as opposed to advertising money.

Timing of Cycles is Key

The next thing to focus on is the timing of the cycles. You want to be able to match phase two of your cycle with consumer buying cycles. This isn’t necessarily that hard to do.

For example, with the Christmas season ramping into full gear here in November, we’re entering one of the hottest buying seasons for many consumer-oriented businesses. If your customers go into a major buying cycle during this season, you’d want to have executed phase one of your cycle (the display advertising phase) in October and November.

You also need to be prepared to have a lower return on ad spending during phase one of the cycle. Your display advertising spending will run at a lower ROI. You reap the gains in phase two. (continued)

SearchEngineWatch: How to Integrate PPC and Display Advertising

Blogged with Flock

Tags: SEMDisplay Advertising

Popularity: 2% [?]