Analysing the effect of offline media on online conversion actions

Abstract

Recognising the web as one of the most popular mediums for information distribution, online advertising is nowadays a booming business. Arriving to a company website is often done by interacting with search engine advertisements. In this paper, we investigate how offline advertising by means of TV and radio influences the search engine advertisement that leads to users visiting a company marketing website (a conversion action). Our research is based on the search engine-driven conversion actions of the 2012 marketing campaign 'Do Us A Flavour' of the chips manufacturer Lays, for which we experimented with several prediction models: linear regression (linear model), support vector regression (nonlinear model), and six distributed lag models (linear autoregressive models). Our results show that offline commercials positively influence the online marketing campaign. We have also determined that this influence is higher for TV than for radio, and that general-purpose TV channels have a higher impact on the number of conversion actions than specialised TV channels. In addition, we observed that TV advertisements have the highest influence on conversion actions in the first 50 minutes after the advertisement broadcasting.