A year-long study of nine consumer goods brands has shown that every £1 spent on display ads drives £1.94 in sales – with one brand seeing a £3.38 return.
Carried out by Unilever, Nestlé, i2c, Nielsen, Nectar and the IAB UK, ads were tested for Nescafé, Häagen Dazs, Persil, PG Tips, Magnum, Surf, Maille, Tropicana and Aquafresh across mainstream desktop and mobile sites including the Guardian, Yahoo!, eBay, Gumtree, AutoTrader and Mail Online.
The purchasing behaviour of those who received the ads was compared to those who didn’t using a combination of Nectar loyalty card data – providing transaction data for over 12 million Sainsbury’s customers – and Nielsen Homescan data, which measured shopping behaviour at other UK supermarkets.
“The ‘Holy Grail’ question we get from marketers is what impact does an online ad have on offline sales, and the answer is a very big one as the vast majority of the sales attributable to the online ad happened in-store,” said the IAB’s chief digital officer Tim Elkington.
“The calibre and range of the brands involved in the project gives marketers a reassuring guide as to what their investment in digital will pay back.”
All of the ads carried a Sainsbury’s logo which Elkington says illustrates the “halo effect” that store-branded advertising can have on sales in other supermarkets.
The IAB conservatively estimates that these co-branded ads are 21% as effective at driving additional sales at a different supermarket as they are at Sainsbury’s.
The estimate is based on the statistic that 55% of shoppers believe an ad carrying the Sainsbury’s logo means the product would be available in other supermarkets, while 38% said the Sainsbury’s logo would make no difference to which supermarket they purchased it from (i.e. 55% x 38% = 21%).
The study, which was delivered by i2c – a joint venture between Sainsbury’s and Aimia (owner of the Nectar programme) – also found that online ads have a positive effect on people’s awareness of and favourability towards the brand – most notably that people who saw the ads were 12% more likely to consider the brand to be “premium”.
