TV Creates Incremental Demand, But Search Takes the Credit

Google and Meta have built multi-hundred-billion dollar ad businesses claiming to drive purchases. But many of the purchases are not necessarily incremental. Especially in the case of paid search, as many sales attributed to the channel just amount to Google taking credit for a purchase that would’ve happened anyway. Someone googling “Nike shoes” was highly likely to buy Nike shoes, with or without a search ad.

TV is different. Even though TV has historically been considered an awareness channel due to imperfect measurement, the channel actually drives massive increases in demand and sales. Last-click channels such as search are quick to claim credit, but the lift is coming from TV.

We can now prove that TV performs by measuring both its direct and indirect impact on demand and sales. For example, here is a graph that shows website visits spiking for a jewelry brand directly after the brand ran advertising on TV.

As you can see, average website visits spike massively immediately after TV ad exposure.

Many of these website visitors purchase a product (see chart below). At the very least, the TV ad has clearly succeeded at driving incremental website awareness and consideration, as demonstrated by the website visit spike.  What’s most interesting is that because you can’t click on a TV ad, this spike in website visitors comes through and is most often erroneously attributed to last-click channels:

• Google search referred traffic spiked 600% (in the 2 hours post TV ad).  

• Direct domain type-in: +255% (this is from people grabbing their device after seeing an ad – 70% of us watch TV with a device in hand–and typing in the advertiser domain name)

• Facebook: -14% (down because people don’t usually engage in Facebook while watching TV)

If we take Google's claimed attribution out of the equation for this customer, TV drove a >10x lift in web visits in the immediate aftermath of an ad being delivered.  This of course excludes the longer term awareness and conversion value these ads deliver after 2 hours. 

Now, from a common sense POV, what’s more likely here – did a million or so people spontaneously self-organize and simultaneously search for this product, or did a million or so households get exposed to a TV ad, resulting in a lot of new searches for the product? 

The Greatest Attribution Heist of All Time
So while TV clearly drives awareness, intent, and searches, marketers are led to believe that the last-click channel (e.g., Google) was the source of that intent, when in reality, they just delivered the “last mile” of the consumer journey that began with the TV ad. It’s like giving FedEx attribution credit for the Amazon package on your doorstep when you really ordered from Amazon, and FedEx just delivered the package.

It’s not just intent or consideration, though. We see the same spike in purchase volume for the brand right after the TV ad runs (and yes, our data science team does full incrementality analysis to calculate exact incremental sales & ROAS).

The data is clear, self-evident, and aligned with common sense: TV drives massive increases in awareness, intent, and yes, sales.

TV has historically not been given the credit for direct impact for as many sales as it actually drives, mainly due to the measurement tactics of bottom-of-funnel “intent harvesters" such as paid search providers claiming credit for sales via last-click attribution. But, in reality, TV has been behind sales success for a long, long time. And now, tvScientific can definitively prove that TV performs. Let us prove it to you.