When TV Meets Search: How Coordinated Ads Boost Online Sales

Real-time syncing – adjusting digital ads immediately after TV airings – can help firms capture more value from advertising.

Television ads now echo online

Television remains a powerful tool to raise brand awareness, but its impact doesn’t end with the broadcast. Viewers often turn to search engines moments after seeing a TV ad. What happens next – whether a consumer visits a website, purchases, or exits the funnel – depends not just on the TV spot, but also on the ads they find (or do not find) when they search online.

Our research explored the effectiveness of “real-time syncing”: dynamically adjusting search engine ads right after a TV ad airs. Despite its growing adoption by media agencies, evidence of real-time syncing’s value has been limited. We partnered with a French direct-to-consumer sleep product company to examine the impact of syncing branded search ads with a national TV campaign.

During an 11-day campaign involving 226 TV spot airings, we ran a randomized field experiment. In different regions and time periods, we varied whether branded text ads (simple links with brand keywords), branded shopping ads (product visuals and prices), both, or neither appeared in search engine results. This allowed us to isolate the impact of each strategy on website visits and conversion rates in the ten-minute window following TV airings.

After TV ads, text ads drive traffic, and shopping ads boost conversions

We found that branded text ads significantly increased website visits after TV ads aired. However, they also attracted more information seekers – visitors curious about the brand but less likely to buy – resulting in lower conversions. In contrast, shopping ads (which display product images and prices) helped filter out less interested users. This rendered it the strategy with the most conversions after television ads.

Besides, consumers behave differently after TV ads. When search ads were paused, up to 92% of users still found the brand’s website through organic or direct traffic. But this substitution effect dropped significantly after TV ads aired, to about 68%. This suggests that TV prompts a different kind of searcher – one more reliant on paid links and more likely to be in the early stages of the purchase journey. These users are also more cost-effective to target: gaining an incremental click from one of these customers is four times cheaper.

Revenue impact: Timing matters

We ran simulations using our model to estimate which syncing strategy would have generated the most revenue. The results show that enabling both text and shopping ads works best when no TV ads are airing. But in the minutes following a TV spot, the optimal strategy shifts: enabling shopping ads alone generates more conversions due to their filtering power. A syncing strategy that switches between these two modes depending on TV airtime could have increased the company’s revenue by 5.0-9.4%.

What this means for advertisers

Our study confirms two critical conditions for real-time syncing to work. First, TV and search ads must interact – which we show they do. Second, the best digital strategy must differ before and after TV ads air. When both conditions hold, syncing becomes a revenue-enhancing strategy.

We also offer a simple framework for testing syncing strategies without deploying the technology upfront. This helps advertisers and agencies assess whether investing in syncing services makes sense, and which combinations of media are most effective.

While most prior research focused on large, familiar brands, our partner was a relatively unknown company with less than 5% brand awareness. Yet the uplift in website visits and the potential revenue gains from syncing were substantial. For resource-constrained firms, strategically coordinating online and offline campaigns can be a cost-effective way to compete with bigger players.

“Our results show that real-time syncing between TV and search ads can improve advertising returns – even for smaller brands with limited awareness.”