I researched a sample of 15 retailers (and a few direct to consumer manufacturers) spanning apparel and accessories, school supplies, computer hardware and software, and ancillary consumer electronics/entertainment categories for the period July 2008 and August 2008, the typical Back To School shopping period. I also looked at online advertising activity for these companies for the same period using our AdRelevance service.

It is worthy to note that Dell and Target are the two heavy hitters on online advertising impressions compared to all others in this sample. Although Amazon and Wal-Mart had significantly fewer online ad impressions than did Dell and Target, Amazon saw huge traffic to its site and Wal-Mart saw significant traffic as well. It seems that Dell has invested proportionately significantly more in online advertising during the BTS period to drive relatively lower traffic to its site than the other retailers.

For other retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Circuit City, OfficeMax and Office Deport, their spend levels and traffic seem proportionate. Does online advertising drive traffic? There is evidence it does, and there are other critical factors that drive online traffic, such as relevancy of retailer to the specific shopping period or need (here BTS), strength of the Brick & Mortar and/or online brand, etc.

Tags: back to school, online advertising, retail

Since becoming part of the larger Nielsen family, we at Nielsen Online have been able to pursue cross-media research more than ever before  with exciting results. Ken Cassar has blogged about his findings regarding the merits of multi-channel retail. Results of a recent Nielsen Online survey show that most consumer-electronics shoppers turn to the Web to conduct product research, but are more likely to make their final purchase in-store. Moreover, multi-channel shoppers tend to spend more in store than offline-only shoppers by as much as 61 percent. These two channels can compliment rather than compete with each other, if retailers build on their unique strengths.

Perhaps to an even greater extent, media brands also find themselves appealing to this free-ranging consumer. ESPN, a true cross-media brand, has been working with Nielsen to determine how ESPN fans navigate across platforms. It might surprise you to learn that users of both ESPN TV and ESPN.com actually spent 27 percent more time watching ESPN TV than TV-only users and 50 percent more time at ESPN.com than Internet-only users. In this case, the more sports, the better!

You can find more details about each of these studies in this month’s Nielsen Consumer Insights newsletter. I encourage you to check it out - it’s another valuable resource based on Nielsen’s wide range of research services and analyst insights.

Tags: cross-media, multi-platform, retail