How Online Ads Affect Online Sales

Online advertising has been growing for years, and now the medium is behind only television in total ad dollars. There’s a reason for that: Internet ads work, and they’re especially adept at pushing consumers to buy online. The web combines the very best of direct advertising, reaching people at the point of purchase, with the vast reach of the internet, which has become an increasingly important part of our everyday lives.

This logic is upheld by a recent study from Twitter and Datalogix. The study found that online advertising can help boost offline sales. This can also have implications for sales of a product online.

How Twitter Can Help

The study notes that people who saw a company’s tweet spent 8 percent more on that company than those who did not. That seems logical, since if you follow a company on Twitter, you’re likely to be shopping there to begin with. But the study also revealed that people who responded to ads on Twitter, or sponsored tweets, spent an additional 12 percent with the company.

That’s striking because it means that people who would not have otherwise engaged with the company were pulled in by advertising. Finding people who are interested in your product and making it easy for them to buy, like including a link to where they can find that product on sale online, ensures you will get a return on investment. That’s in contrast to offline advertising, where ROI is often more nebulous.

Pay More and Get More

It’s tempting to want to save money on advertising when the payoff isn’t clear; after all, it’s much cheaper just to send out a tweet about an upcoming special event or in-store sale. But the study found that there’s a real correlation between product sales and what’s been advertised on Twitter. Those who saw Promoted Tweets, another paid Twitter advertising program, were 29 percent more likely to make an in-store purchase than those who saw similar information in a company’s news feed.

The lesson here is that going out of your way to brand something as advertising can really pay off. People tend to pay more attention to something out of the ordinary in their news feed, and Promoted Tweets get footers or headers identifying them as paid, setting them off from the rest of the information on the feed. That can help when trying to drive online as well as offline sales. After all, it’s much easier to make the sale at the point of purchase, i.e. the desktop computer or mobile device were the person is checking in on Twitter.

How Companies Can Benefit

There’s clearly a tie between online advertising and sales. Think about how this can benefit your company and what you are trying to sell. Promoted Tweets may sound like an unnecessary investment when you already have a Twitter feed where you can promote things for free, but you can reach a much wider audience with a Promoted Tweet than one organic to your news page. And when others retweet you, your potential audience reach gets that much bigger, generating that many more online sales. One thing to consider is if you’re selling a product online, Twitter might be of more benefit to you than to someone who isn’t. For example, Maxwell Systems web based software is a software you can buy online they would have a more successful result on Twitter than a drink or food company that you have to move away from the computer to purchase. Know your audience and tailor your tweets towards them.