In short, digital and email marketing drive many potential customers to your website, but if these visitors have also recently seen a TV ad, they are more likely to make a purchase than those who haven’t, according to research by the VAB and others. In a world where every marketing dollar is aggressively optimized, if you’re not running TV ads, you’re missing out.

Measuring the halo effect
Understanding TV’s halo effect starts with measuring how exposure to TV advertising influences performance in other channels. Advertisers often compare conversion rates (CVR) among website visitors who arrive via display, social or email campaigns, identifying how many ultimately make a purchase. By segmenting audiences based on their recent exposure to TV ads, it becomes possible to see whether TV is amplifying those other marketing efforts.

Tatari does this by dividing marketing-sourced traffic into two groups: those who viewed a TV ad within the last seven days (Group A) and those who didn’t (Group B).

When we measure the CVRs of these cohorts separately, we find a striking effect. For the vast majority of our clients, the CVR of Group A is significantly higher than the CVR of Group B. In fact, among 100 brands for which we measured this effect for social marketing-driven traffic:

· Nine out of 10 brands saw higher CVRs from website visitors exposed to TV ads
· 60% of companies saw a CVR lift of over 50%
· 33% saw a lift of over 100%

Analyses of email-driven and other traffic show similar results. This is just our approach to quantify the halo effect. When measured carefully, we believe TV advertising consistently drives incremental lift across all marketing channels.

The proof is in the data
Remember that campaign you recently launched and measured, where Instagram was your apparent winner? You may be tempted (or asked!) to shift your budget out of TV and back into all your digital and social channels. But doing that would mean missing out on TV’s halo effect.

In the modern multi-touch marketing landscape, growing your TV footprint not only increases your overall brand awareness but also positively influences your other marketing channels. Here’s an example of how we demonstrate this impact.

In this figure, each data point represents the relative increase in CVR that a Tatari client sees due to website visitors who have recently seen a TV ad. For example, a relative gain of 100% means that a website visitor who has seen an ad served by Tatari is twice as likely to convert than a visitor who has not seen an ad.

These data points are grouped by traffic referral source (where visitors enter the site). The lines in each group indicate the mean and median boost calculated across all companies with that referrer type. Social and email show a consistent positive signal across many clients, while paid mobile data suggests a potentially even stronger effect, though based on less available data.

Note: The vertical scale of this figure has been chosen to show most of the observed data. However, some companies do have boost factors significantly above the displayed range, resulting in higher mean values for some of the categories.

As the data illustrates, exposure to a TV ad can double or even triple your conversion rates.