Kelly Wall of Google’s Retail Team was spare on data in a report about an experiment to see how online advertising affected offline, in-store sales, probably because it took some convincing to get the participants to share their sales data to begin with. So we’ll have to take Kelly’s word for it that one retail client saw a 300 percent return on investment.
But the experiment is worth a mention because, as Wall notes, there is very little data one can point to as evidence of the impact of online advertising by itself. To be convinced marketers want numbers, and in effect this test case supplies those numbers. No doubt Google’s sales team will be pointing to them often from here on out.
According to Wall, Google won the permission of a furniture retailer and its agency to test a campaign and to measure the sales results. The test came at a dicey time: as the economy crumbled, consumer confidence diminished, and retailers everywhere took hits.
Despite that, Wall says a search and display advertising campaign conducted exclusively online for specific products resulted in a 2 percent overall sales lift, on par with results from “pricey newspaper inserts and other offline media.”
The furniture category itself, which is said to have a longer buying cycle than what the test measured, saw a 1.4 percent increase, while shorter cycled products like dining and decorative accessories saw a 2.9 percent and 2.2 percent sales lift respectively.
That’s not too bad for selling furniture in a crummy market. Google’s Retail Team estimates their test delivered $3 in sales for every $1 spent online, hence the 300 percent ROI claim.
