Two pieces of European adCenter news today!
Firstly, further to my post on UK PPC Research a couple of weeks ago, we've released some more compelling research into the effect of combining search advertising with display ads in online marketing campaigns.
Working with a high street bank who wanted to drive traffic to their site and increase user engagement, we enlisted comScore to help us measure the effectiveness of users just seeing display ads on the MSN homepage, just seeing search ads served through adCenter on Live Search, and a combination of both.
The results were pretty staggering:
- Search and display advertising together increased traffic to the bank’s website during the campaign period by 23 percentage points — seven times as much as the display ads alone, and three times as much as the search ads.
- The combination also increased time spent on the website by 8.8 percentage points — six times as much as display alone.
- Search and display combined increased visits to secure pages on the bank’s website during the campaign by 14.9 percentage points — more than seven times as much as display alone.
For more information check out our advertising site and download the brochure here:
Microsoft UK Search and Display Research Case Study
Secondly - On Friday 13th June we held an event here in our London offices called adChamps Europe 2008
adChamps is a one day conference where we invite 40 or so advertisers and agencies to meet our product and engineering teams. It's all about feedback. We're very keen to find out what advertisers think of our search ad platform and in what ways you'd like it improved.
The day started with Chris Dobson, who heads up our UK advertising business, talking about our vision for the future online advertising and the Microsoft Advertising brand.
We then went into a series of deep dives, talking to customers about specific areas of PPC like editorial, tools and market-place quality.
The afternoon was a demofest of tools and technologies like Silverlight and Photosynth plus a 45 minute tips and tricks session on the adCenter Add-In for Excel.
The day was very well received, and our internal teams learned a lot from the very valuable feedback which they're busy integrating into plans for the next year!
Here are a couple of presentations from the day that we can share:
Chris Dobson - The New Media Landscape
Tor Crockatt - adCenter Editorial
Thankyou to everyone who attended and made the day such an engaging and vibrant event for all concerned.