About 4 in 10 (41% of) US consumers ages 16-64 have used a search engine to look up information after seeing an out of home ad in the past 6 months, according to a report [download page] from the Out of Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA) and Comscore.
This was the top action reported by survey participants in response to seeing an out of home (OOH) ad, and was also one of the top ad types to elicit a response across all the types measured. Indeed, only TV ads generated a higher response among the consumers surveyed, of whom 45% said they had searched for more information about a company after seeing a TV ad.
The next-most common online action taken by survey participants in response to seeing an OOH ad was searching for information on social media sites about what they had seen advertised, with one-third (33%) having done so in the past 6 months. This was followed by searching video sites for more information (30%) and visiting the advertiser’s website (28%).
This same ranking of online actions was also evident among those who had seen video ads, though slightly fewer reported having performed each action than in response to OOH or TV ads.
Some ad types seemed slightly more likely to elicit a website visit. For example, rather than a social media search, a website visit was the joint second-most common online action taken in response to seeing a TV ad, hearing a radio ad, and reading a print ad. And while using a search engine to look up information was the most common action in response to all ad types, display ads were almost equally as likely to generate a website visit as a search engine query.
Meanwhile, almost one-quarter (24%) of consumers reported having made a purchase online after seeing a TV ad in the past 6 months, making TV ads the leader in that respect among the ad types measured. Following TV ads in this survey were OOH ads, with 1 in 5 respondents reporting an online purchase as a result of seeing an OOH ad in the previous 6 months. A separate study last year from the OAAA similarly found 1 in 5 consumers saying that an OOH ad had influenced a purchase decision.
When factoring in ad spending, the OAAA and Comscore study argues that OOH is easily the most efficient ad type, overdelivering in each online action per dollar spent. Print and radio also fared well by this calculation, while TV, video ads, and display all underdelivered.
Check out the full results by downloading the report here.
About the Data: The results are based on a March survey of 1,580 US consumers ages 16-64.
