It’s common for brands these days to do most of their selling through their website. As a result, a regular question we get asked by potential TV clients is “will a TV advert get me more website visitors?”
The short answer is (usually) yes. But let’s dig a bit deeper into the how and why of using TV advertising to support your website.
What effect does TV advertising have on website traffic?
Research demonstrates that TV advertising spend and website traffic are directly correlated. Increasing TV advertising spend increases website traffic and decreasing it has the opposite effect.
However, within this relatively simple formula, there is quite a bit of variance. Factors like TV advert placement, frequency and, above all, the quality of the advertising creative will determine the strength of the impact your TV advert has on your website audience.
Creative tricks to increase web traffic from your TV adverts
- Your website URL should remain on screen for the duration of the advert.
- Voiceover is where you put the most important information in a TV advert, so make sure your script includes your website URL at least twice.
- Script your advert’s characters visiting your website, so your TV audience can see the action you want them to take.
- Use response advertising methods like “10% off when you buy online this month” to increase urgency and motivation for TV viewers to find your website.
Short, memorable website URLs are TV-friendly
This is so important to the success of your TV-for-web-traffic endeavours that it merits its own section. Having a website URL that is easy to recall is crucial if you want your TV audience to find you online.
If your website URL is long, you should seriously consider buying a custom domain which is shorter and more memorable. This can cost as little as £10/year, but even if it costs £200 it’s a small investment in the context of how much a TV advert costs overall – yet it will dramatically improve your results.
“Hang on”, you might say “I don’t want to change my whole website address just for one TV campaign!”
You don’t need to. Simply get your web agency to redirect the new URL to your old one, and all the traffic from your TV campaign will be driven to your existing website.
For example, if we were running a TV campaign for our website, we might try to buy “Happy.TV”, as it’s much shorter than happyhourproductions.co.uk and the .TV extension helps make it more memorable and relevant to what we sell (TV adverts!)
This has the added benefit of making measurement much easier – you can create a segment called “TV campaign traffic” in your analytics platform for all traffic referred by the TV campaign URL.
Which brings us on to…
Measuring the impact of TV advertising on web traffic
As mentioned above, you can use your campaign URL to segment your traffic. But you should also set up custom reporting that cross-references your TV advertising schedule with your overall website traffic, to check for surges in activity. You can then create further segments based on who visited your website in these surge periods, in order to move them down the marketing funnel towards a sale or conversion.
It is also worth cross-referencing your advertising schedule with your SEO tool of choice to check for spikes in brand searches and to confirm that these search users are finding your website.
If they aren’t, it may be time to…
Support your TV advertising with brand PPC
Even if you don’t normally invest in brand PPC (ie paying to be the top listing on search engines for your brand name) you should consider it to help scoop up more web traffic from your TV advert.
You might already occupy the top organic search spot for your brand name and therefore feel that also paying for the top PPC spot is overkill. However, it is worth doing if any of the following are true:
- Your brand has a reasonably generic name, particularly one associated with a product.
- Your competitors are paying to advertise against searches for your brand.
- Your brand name is easy to misspell.
Generic product names can cause search engine confusion and make it more difficult for users to find your website due to the presence of other advertisers trying to target that term. For example, Boots might want to run PPC against their name to appear above Google Shopping listings for, well… actual boots.
Competitors might also deliberately target your brand name in their own PPC ads – and you don’t want to run a successful TV campaign only to send traffic to a rival’s website!
Last, but not least, users don’t always type things into Google correctly and your brand may not be the top organic result for some common misspellings. You can still benefit from these incorrect spellings by targeting them with PPC.
The good news is that PPC costs for your own name are usually very low. Your Quality Score should be high, giving you an efficient cost per click. You can also set your PPC to only run when you know your TV adverts are showing.
Interested to know more?
If you’d like to have an informal, no-pressure chat about a TV campaign to increase your website traffic and sales, we’d love you to get in touch. You can reach us via our contact form – or, if email’s your thing, info@hhour.co.uk
