Yahoo and ComScore conducted a study on behavior of visitors who had been exposed to online advertising and found that pre-shoppers (people who research products and services online prior to purchasing) have a tendency to purchase more in stores after having conducted research online. On average, these highly engaged pre-shoppers tend to spend about 41% more in-store than consumers that had not been exposed to online advertising.

Although recent research cites 89 percent* of consumers shop for information about products online, less than 7 percent** of retail sales actually take place online…

This means retailers have a prime opportunity to engage this audience of ‘pre-shoppers’ through online advertising to capture incremental sales in-store.

Amy Vener, Senior Director of Retail Category at Yahoo!

Here are some key insights from the study:

• Consumers exposed to online advertising are more engaged: Consumers exposed to display and/or search advertising viewed an average of six more pages during the period in which they were researching compared to those not exposed to advertising.
• Almost 90 percent of the incremental sales generated by online advertising take place in-store:
  Consumers exposed to online advertising spent an incremental six dollars in-store for every one dollar spent online.
• Integrated search and display campaigns have maximum impact:Combined search and display ad campaigns resulted in deeper engagement for consumers exposed to those ads, leading to increased sales.

The study was conducted from April 2006 to January 2007 and involved more that 175000 comScore panelists.

It seems retail companies have something to look forward to. The Internet is becoming a great resource for qualified leads for retailers, and such a drastic difference (+41%!) when comparing regular consumers to pre-shoppers should justify an increase in online marketing spending. Even if the actual difference for your operation turns out to be smaller that found in this study, if properly leveraged, is still a very good improvement for your retail operation.

Read the whole story here.

Share This