Thales Teixeira, Harvard Business School
Thales Teixeira, Harvard Business School
How TV Advertising Impacts Online Visitation and Sales
How TV Advertising Impacts Online Visitation and Sales
We investigate how
television advertising content affects online traffic to the advertiser’s
website and their sales. To do so, we assemble a unique quasi-experimental
database that tracks the changes in 22 brands’ online website visitation from
two important routes, either directly (e.g., URL typing) or indirectly (e.g.,
via search engines) and corresponding purchases made. The data include more
than 374,000 insertions of 1,326 different TV advertisements appearing in US
broadcast networks in 2010. We also code 21 features of advertising content to
understand the extent to which each one promotes the brand’s short-run (direct
response) or long-run sales (brand-image building). We find that distinct
elements of television advertising content affects internet traffic and sales.
Direct-response elements induce either visitation, direct or via search engine,
or purchases, but not both. Brand-image building ads are also prone to this
trade-off and in addition do not drive direct visitation immediately after the
ad is aired or shortly thereafter. Approaches to better integrating TV ads with
online search and website advertising are discussed.