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“Displaying Search” is a column capturing the intersection of display advertising and search marketing.

Today’s column is written by Justin Merickel, VP of New Product Development and Marketing at Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing solutions company.

The other day a group of us at Efficient Frontier gathered in a conference room to discuss display optimization. We met to dig into the comparative ROI for various audience segments, including site-driven retargeting and 3rd-party purchased segments. One of our lead engineers developed an interesting analogy that mapped audience targets to search term types. The search term to audience segment analogy is an interesting way to think about relevance and tactically design portfolios of targets for display campaigns.

Before jumping into display, let me set up the analogy by talking about term types in search. We tend to think about search terms in three buckets: head, torso, and tail. Head terms have mass amounts of queries but are less specific in query intent, torso terms have decent query volume and some specificity in intent, while tail terms tend to have little volume but have very clear intent. Additionally, in search marketing, we typically isolate brand terms into their own category.
With that in mind, the display to search analogy goes like this: retargeting is like search brand terms, 3rd party data buys are like search torso and tail terms, and site or content targeting is most like search head terms. Let me play it through with you in more detail.

Site retargeting typically delivers strong ROI but is limited in scale. The only value question clients ask is what percentage of retargeting conversions would have occurred without the influence of ads. Luckily, the question of incremental value for retargeting is a fairly straightforward one to address with testing.

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