Great post! I completely agree with you on these comments…

“The problem with online advertising is that the advertisers are blinded by click-through rates, and often disregard the branding aspects and the long term benefits. As an example, either online or offline, the challenge for the advertising industry is to understand that the consumers might not have an immediate need to purchase a product, and that banner advertising (when done right) can have a huge impact on branding.”

There are some great tools out there in the industry that help to measure the branding efffects of display ads. For example, here at Yahoo!, all advertisers that run Yahoo! search ads have access to a web analytics tool in their accounts called Full Analytics. Not only does Full Analytics allow an advertiser to track the performance of their search ads, but it also allows teh advertiser to track any other kind of ad under one roof (such as display, email, shopping ads, etc).

The best part of Full Analytics is that it also provides the Assist metric. An Assist shows the total number of times that an ad or keyword contributed to the conversion of another ad or keyword.

For example, let’s that that an advertiser uses Full Analytics to track their display/banner ad performance and their search ad performance. If a visitor clicks on a display and and doesn’t convert, but later goes to Yahoo, runs a search, clicks on the paid search ad, and then converts….we’ll give the display ad an Assist and will give the search ad the conversion. So even though the display ad did not directly drive the conversion, we still give it credit for contributing to the conversion. This of course helps an advertiser see that their display ads are being used for branding ads purposes versus direct response ads.

Right now, Full Analytics only provides Assist data on clicked ads. But we’ve also been working on the ability to track Assists at the impression level. So even if a visitor just reaches a page with an ad on it and then later converts off search, we’ll still give the display ad an Assist for helping to drive the search conversion.

I receommend any client that is running both search and display ads to try out Full Analytics since it’s free in their Yahoo! Search Marketing account.

Regards,
Matt Lillig
Yahoo! Search Analytics Lead