Display Extension helps you tie together search and display campaigns­

When I used to work at an agency, we would try to convince brands to bring all their marketing business—search, display, whatever—to us. A one stop shop equals efficiency and, more importantly, integrated planning, right? But integrated planning only works if you’re really coordinating all of your campaigns.

Back then, planning meant meeting every month to re-allocate budget to the tactic that needed it.
“So the search team needs more money to maintain top positions? Let’s move $150k from the display budget to search, then.” It didn’t mean we could measure how, for instance, the display advertising we bought on Yahoo! influenced the search advertising we bought elsewhere so that we could maximize cross-channel impact. The tools to track marketing across multiple tactics just weren’t there.

We needed something like Display Extension, which Yahoo! just announced—a way to not only track search and display campaigns together, but even show display ads to search users.

Making search and display work together
There are good reasons to coordinate your search and display efforts. According to a 2008 Specific Media study, people who saw a display ad for a product or brand were 155% more likely to search for that product than those who didn’t.

Display Extension allows an agency to truly capture the synergies between digital tactics. The solution not only tackles the cross-channel attribution question via Assist Reporting, but also makes those insights actionable with Search Retargeting. And for search agencies who want to move into display, we provide the technology and the display creative/media guidance to help make it happen.

Here are more specifics on what Display Extension includes:

Assist Reporting: Understand the value of the final conversion and its influencing actions across all your digital channels. That display ad you bought may not have converted well on its own, but it might have contributed to conversions driven by other ads (perhaps a brand term you bought on Yahoo!).

Search Retargeting: Directly tie your search and display marketing by understanding which users responded to your search ads and re-messaging them with a display ad on the Right Media Exchange.

Creative Services: Get guidance on creative best practices and how to manage your in-house creative team.

Media Solutions and Consultation: Take your Display Extension solution to market with help in packaging search and display together, optimizing ads and developing messaging for clients.

Publishers can also get value out of Display Extension, whether they need an immediately measurable branding metric like Assists to unlock the value of their display views, or whether they want to provide more agency-like services with creative and media solutions.

Whatever your advertising model, you can work to understand it better to drive the best performance from your entire digital portfolio, reach users that have demonstrated strong intent in search with relevant display advertising across the Right Media Exchange, and help increase revenue through a measurable multi-channel solution. Visit our Professional Services website to get started.

—Shoen Yang, Agency Professional Services