Are your TV ads accidentally helping your competitors’ Google Search Ads to perform better?

Running targeted TV ads and Google Search ads in parallel can be a powerful combination. Be careful though, if your creative for the TV ad is generic and draws the viewer's attention to only the category (for example: why they might need a car insurance), then the viewer will search on google only for the category, i.e. car insurance. Your challenger brand won’t be able to compete with the deep advertising pockets of market leaders in that category, who will appear in the top five paid search result ads. So your audience will click on their Google paid search ads instead of your paid search ads.

The solution is to have something memorable in your first 5 seconds of your TV ad creative. This will allow your target audience to search for that memorable thing on Google, giving your company a greater chance of ranking higher in Google paid search ads. 

As discussed in our masterclass video clip, this memorable thing could be: your brand name, character, jingle, logo, graphic, animation, set design or editing style. 

Research shows that when your target audience sees your TV ad, they google what they saw on TV on their phones. This is called “Second Screen Effect” which simply means that we are all sitting close to our phones whilst watching TV. And if the TV ad is intriguing we will search for it on google. 

There is a direct correlation between TV ads and google search results. See chart below of how this impact viewers in the US.

Market leaders dominate the first page of Google, whilst challenger brands are placed further back. The average person doesn’t go past the first five listings on a search engine. Research also shows that websites on the first page of a search engine receive 95% of website traffic. Leaving only 5% for the remaining searching engine pages. The problem for a lot of challenger brands is their websites don’t typically make it on the first page of search engines, this subsequently results in less website traffic and sales. 

So next time you are planning to create a TV ad, make sure to include your brand name or something memorable that viewers can search online.

In the video clip above the following people from Ekstasy participated: Mike Saraswat - CEO and Founder, Abigail Hodges - Creative Strategist, and Kieron Osei-Kuffour - Account Executive.