Great post - as usual! - from Avinash Kaushik on the impact of radio ads on web traffic.
I'm doing a session at the IAB's Engage for Search tomorrow on the integration of search marketing with other on and offline media - this data might have arrived just too late for me to rip it off, sorry, add it to my presentation.
Anyway, there are some great slides on the potential way you could measure web traffic against radio advertising impacts. Well OK, they aren't real slides - they are just a bit too neat for that. But they do show a plausible example of how radio ads could impact on total site traffic and on branded search.
It's exactly what we showed through a piece of research we worked on with Nielsen Netratings. We asked consumers what action they would take as a result of seeing a banner ad: 58% said that they would search either for the brand or for a related generic search term.
Essentially search has become an all-purpose glue between the on and offline worlds, and between different online channels. No one needs to write down or remember a URL - you now trust that Google et al can quickly find you the site you are looking for (or a better one).
What are the lessons from this?
Well in the real world, very few people are tying together seemingly unrelated metrics like radio ratings and branded searches. But if they did, they might start to see some very interesting insights.
