At the recent Adtech Conference in New York it was revealed that an estimated 60% of every global marketing dollar was being spent with either Google or Facebook (with Google taking the lion’s share of that 60%).
“When marketers think GDN they think effective performance and cost effective reach,” comments Neil Clarence COO of location-based advertising network Vicinity Media. “They also tend to think bigger is better - something we decided to put to the test. Our view at Vicinity is that huge scale and billions of impressions don’t always benefit the advertiser. We believe in the value of one relevant impression over 10 irrelevant, wasted views.”
Neil and his team took a look at Google Display Network’s (GDN) CTR statistics* as published on Wordstream's website and compared them to the same sectors across Vicinity Media's location-based mobile network over the August and September periods.
"The majority of the figures really surprised us," he says. "Although we did not run campaigns across all the same sectors, we compared our performance figures against the freely obtainable data on the Wordstream website and found that in the retail sector for example, Vicinity delivered over 61% more clicks than GDN, from the same number of impressions.”
Understandably, the real estate sector (being very location focused) performed best, producing over 70% more click throughs than the equivalent number of impressions would on GDN. Other sectors included:
- Travel and hospitality garnering a 0.52% CTR versus 0.47% on GDN,
- Motoring with a CTR of 0.62% against the 0.41% registered on GDN
The performance increase can be attributed to Vicinity’s true and accurate location data and to the fact that Vicinity uses this data to generate location enhanced rich media communication that is both relevant and engaging. Users are able to identify location based ads from standard display ads, which increase performance.
Performance is further bolstered by the high number of premium ad formats in the network, which are performing remarkably well (0,9% CTR ), paying huge dividends for clients.
A related differentiator between Vicinity and GDN is that post banner click, the user goes to the Vicinity landing page. This delivers further engagements such as Walk, Drive and Call. Clarence adds, “Vicinity not only delivers more clicks, but we provide a landing page that provides real client acquisitions. Think of it as getting the most out of those increased clicks.
Our study indicates that Google is the ultimate shotgun approach for marketers, Vicinity on the other hand is the sniper with deadly aim – and it all depends on what your objectives are before you decide which weapon you use.”
