In a recent blog post by Bill McCabe, he argues that Google owes a debt of gratitude to the television industry and its advertisers. Every day, Google processes 3.5 billion search queries (40,000 per second, on average). According to McCabe, “when people view a TV commercial that interests them, they naturally go to Google for more information.”
Even more can be said of radio advertising. How many times have you heard an ad on the radio or a podcast and later gone online to research the product or service? Yet the role of radio ads as instigators of Google searches has been overlooked. As McCabe notes, the difficulty for marketers is that when an order arises out of a Google search, advertisers often assume the source was digital.
Direct response radio does its best to track the source of a consumer’s motivation to purchase. However, calls to action that drive to text, phone, or web only track those consumers who use text codes or phone numbers, or those who are motivated and available to act upon those codes the moment they hear them. The truth is that radio advertising informs consumers of products and services, which they recall and research on their computers, phones, or other mobile devices when their schedules allow.
As McCabe points out, “No one randomly types in the name of a brand, product or service. It all starts somewhere else. To see the big picture…[y]ou need to focus on the synergies, not the divisions, that exist between TV [–or in our case, radio–] and digital.”