Study: Customers get wrapped up in online advertising
Online advertising with banners and pop-ups has a positive and, above all, long-term effect on customers' desire to shop. This is the conclusion of a new media study in which the shopping behavior of more than 1.6 million consumers was analyzed.
According to the press release, the analysis of the data collected by the two Yahoo economists David Reiley and Randall Lewis revealed that consumers who were targeted with advertising spent an average of five percent more money on goods. The two authors made use of a trick in their research. The consumers they analyzed not only had a loyalty card from a particular retailer, but also a Yahoo account. As the two researchers had access to both the loyalty card and the Yahoo account, they were able to send around 80 percent of the test subjects targeted advertisements from the chains to their screens as soon as they visited the Yahoo website. The remaining 20 percent were only used for comparison purposes. Using the customer cards, it was then relatively easy to check who had purchased the advertised products.
Long-lasting effect
Online advertising has now become a billion-dollar business - for good reason. As the two authors of the study show, it played a subordinate role in the experiment whether the users had clicked on the online advertising banner. Around 80 percent of shoppers did not react to the advertisement rather than perceiving it. The effect was long-lasting for many customers. Even four weeks later, shopping behavior remained unchanged.
The entire study is available here is available in English as a PDF download.
