All those years my gut told me the billboard impact of buying PPC even when the site I managed owned the #1 keyword is being confirmed by quants including this from SearchEngineLand:
Next time your CFO asks you why you are buying paid search when your site is already #1 organic share this study and you will be more successful than using something accountants rarely understand or trust - a marketer's gut :).I emphasized that there are a number of ways to get at this answer, only one of which we tried. In our case, however, the results were fantastic, as you can see by the positive slope of the regression line in the graph. The positive slope means that when we bought the ad above our organic listing, we actually increased the click through rate of the organic listing. What could be better than that? (emphasis mine)
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Great data Marty. You mentioned this to me when we met for lunch, but it is great to see the data which proves your point. The assumption of course is the company has the funds for PPC and that the breakeven point is fairly short. If the case is neither, a young company may have to settle for #1 organic for a time period until they get to a funding point where it makes sense (which is what we are doing at mailVU). Meanwhile our organic #1 position for "video mail" and "video email" is bringing considerable traffic on a daily basis.
ReplyDeleteAlan,
ReplyDeleteAgreed. You must get a positive return or why do it. I would test those amazing organic listings with tiny budgets say a couple of hundred dollars.
I would also set up an email subscription capture. Once you start buying traffic email is your best conversion friend. Email marketing is very important because B2B customers need to travel along with you before buying sometimes.
Email marketing also follows a predictable routine especially to the audience you are marketing too. They will be able to program your trickle campaign and that is good. When you do expected things in expected ways such as an email trickle campaign you lower the shock of the NEW. As you speak to me over time sharing testimonials, breaking news and success stories you move me from, "I don't know mailVU" to "This is a nobrainer."
PPC for B2B clients can take a bit because your conversion cycles can be longer, so I would lower the daily spend in order to spend longer. I would also think about using Bronto to help you set up the email trickle campaign. I know they are resistant to video email for a reason I can't fully understand, but they can create great trickle campaigns in their sleep (and there is an art to them). Hire them to do your trickle email marketing campaign and I bet they are testing video email before you are done thus killing two birds with a single PPC stone :).
If you come to Durham to talk to them I have a couch you can crash on and would be glad to help in any way I can. Thanks for your insightful comments and amazing tool.
Martin