Got a press release? Put it on the web.
October 3, 2005
Bizarre but true. Most UK PR companies still fail to publish press releases on the internet. If we’re being kind we should concede this is due to ignorance rather than wanton neglect of their clients’ interest. But, really folks, it stands to reason, the more people you expose your message to, the more will hear it.
Consider this article from Clickz which describes a recent piece of research from MarketingExperiments.com
What the data geeks did was pretty striking. First, they sent a series of press releases on different topics through various wire services. Then, they measured the traffic and links back to their site generated by the press releases. Next, they purchased a series of Google PPC (define) ads using keywords that correlated to the press releases’ content. Once the ads were in the hopper, they sat back and tracked the traffic generated by those ads.
What they found was startling. The press releases’ ROI (define) was significantly better than the ads’ ROI. In some cases, the press releases’ actual CPC (define) was zero (not accounting for the time spent writing the releases), while the ads’ CPC for a first-place Google position was as high as $12.25! Looking at all the data, the bottom line is generating traffic with PR was 21.4 to 56.3 percent cheaper than PPC advertising.