The headline is not a misprint, we really have seen over 350 percent lift in revenue with zero promotional cost. The clear implication is that you don’t have to offer discounts or free shipping to get more revenue and better conversion rates from traffic that is already coming to your online store.
Consider this case study which shows where you may be able to get triple digit lift in conversion rate and customer acquisition as well as revenue.
A retailer is buying display ads on a number of different sites and they are bringing in 6 percent of the traffic to that retailer’s online store. The retailer is quite pleased with that number. However, a closer look at how the site is performing reveals that this display ad traffic is not doing as well as expected. To be honest, the conversion rate is disappointing. From this it is reasonable to surmise that the visitors brought in by the display ads are not as happy with their site experience as other visitors.
What to do? You could blame the placement of the display ads or the way they are designed. You could join the “down with display ads” movement. Or you might accept that there is a disconnect between the ads and the site to which they are–quite successfully–driving traffic. Why not run a set of carefully segmented campaigns on the site that deliver messaging targeted directly at those display ad visitors? These campaigns can add special creatives to every page of the site for these visitors, and only these visitors, referencing the site from which they came and echoing the messaging in those display ads.
That’s what the retailer did and here are the results: Measured against a control group, this campaign produced a 267 percent lift in conversion rate. That’s 3.7 times as many conversions as were seen without this segmented messaging. These campaigns also produced a triple digit lift in new customer acquisition rate, 190 percent to be precise. So, with the campaigns in place, the display ads are generating nearly three times as many new customers as before.
And it’s not hard to see why this would work. Think about what happens when you see a relevant ad, click it, and arrive on a web page that doesn’t seem–at first glance–to be related to the display ad. Chances are you move on. Like it or not, that’s how online shoppers behave. If you break the flow, whether it’s with a slow page load or a jarring shift in context or message, they move on.
Why do sites let this happen? That’s as understandable as the rush to pass judgment on display ads. Changes in site design and messaging can be costly and may have long lead times. Things can get out of sync. The display ads say one thing, the site experience to which they bring traffic says another (or something that’s different enough to make a difference, but not in a good way).
By overlaying personalized messaging campaigns on the site you can sync things up. And when you do it pays off. This retailer clocked a 4.5X jump in revenue. To look at these results a different way, consider Cost per Customer Acquisition. In this case, the personalized messaging campaigns reduced the Cost per Customer Acquisition for display ads by 83 percent.
Yes, there are reasons to doubt display ads, but they may be getting a bad rap, as others have contended here and also here (plus this update on display ads in 2008). What we see in this case study is a way of making the most of display ad traffic, without giving anything away. With numbers like these, there’s a least one online retailer who is happy to continue running display ads.
