On Friday E-Consultancy released a summary of search marketing stats that included some of the results published by Google earlier in the month regarding search and its ability to effectively build brands.
The findings are quite interesting:
- A Search impression alone creates 23% more brand preference for Heineken than the whole Heineken campaign without search. A search click creates 69% more brand preference.
- The fact that search was able to affect a brand metric like brand preference shows the ability for search to move consumers further into the purchase funnel, beyond just awareness
Google have put up a video on Youtube that goes through a few of the details.
This isn’t new, back in 2007 Comscore wrote about how search can be more than just a direct response medium, after looking at the consumer packaged goods industry, finding not only that 47% of food product sites were found through search (of course this will include users who use Google like an address bar or for primary navigation), but that those who searched and used a site actually spent more on that category.
I think 2010 will be key to getting this right, harmonising direct response and brand, as well as traditional and online channels will be key, the marketers who get this right could take a competitive advantage.
