The number of e-commerce brands advertising on Television nowadays (in India) is not funny. Pretty much any and every e-commerce brand which has got funding or which is looking for one is on air and in print. Add to sheer number of spots by any given brand, the number of different creatives being used is also very confusing. At any given time, I see 2-3 different ads of the same brand with different messages – one typically being of discounts being offered. I wonder if any of these brands is actually looking at how different thematics are working or the impact of each or calculating the ROI of any of these ads.
Then I came across this paper and it seemed rather interesting. Here’s a crude sketchy post of the same. It talks about 4 different types of ads viz. action-focused, information-focused, emotion-focused and imagery-focused and measures the impact on direct (as well as search) website traffic and sales.
The findings are pretty simple to digest. Action-focus content increases direct website traffic and sales. Information-focus and emotion-focus ad content actually reduce website traffic while simultaneously increasing purchases, with a positive net effect on sales for most brands. Imagery-focus content reduced direct traffic with no impact on transactions.
Now only if some e-commerce advertiser gave me his data for analysis to validate this.
