Radio versus Pay Per Click: Snapshot
This is a follow up to last week’s radio advertising post. That post revolved around a buzz marketing web site, Pony-Hawk.com. Because of the short run of the project the following information should be considered more of a casual observation as opposed to any type of definitive and tested evidence. One of the most intriguing findings was the difference of radio impact versus the performance of a simple PPC campaign.
To My Surprise
I thought that having the web site pushed on a local FM radio station with tens of thousands of listeners would result in more web traffic. The premise and content were an ideal match for the station’s demographic. It was mentioned on the radio at least three times during the morning hours and then numerous other times during the day. The associated graph shows the start of radio coverage and resulting traffic. The highlighted numbers represent web site visitor counts.
PPC Numbers
The PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign was run with a budget of $5.00 per day and bidding on two keywords, sanjaya and pony-hawk, in Google Adwords. A number one position could be bought for 4-5 cents per click. $4.80 delivered an average click through rate of approximately 2% on 6300 impressions and approximately 113 visitors. The PPC campaign was started after the noon hour.
One thing to keep in mind is that the site had not been indexed by search engines. This made organic search engine optimization extremely difficult and an Adwords PPC campaign the first choice.
The entire process gets me interested in comparing and contrasting a well implemented radio advertising campaign with a pay per click campaign. Every web site owner should understand the importance and usage of basic web analytics to track and measure advertising impact.
Additional Resource:
To My Surprise
I thought that having the web site pushed on a local FM radio station with tens of thousands of listeners would result in more web traffic. The premise and content were an ideal match for the station’s demographic. It was mentioned on the radio at least three times during the morning hours and then numerous other times during the day. The associated graph shows the start of radio coverage and resulting traffic. The highlighted numbers represent web site visitor counts.
PPC Numbers
The PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign was run with a budget of $5.00 per day and bidding on two keywords, sanjaya and pony-hawk, in Google Adwords. A number one position could be bought for 4-5 cents per click. $4.80 delivered an average click through rate of approximately 2% on 6300 impressions and approximately 113 visitors. The PPC campaign was started after the noon hour.
One thing to keep in mind is that the site had not been indexed by search engines. This made organic search engine optimization extremely difficult and an Adwords PPC campaign the first choice.
The entire process gets me interested in comparing and contrasting a well implemented radio advertising campaign with a pay per click campaign. Every web site owner should understand the importance and usage of basic web analytics to track and measure advertising impact.
Additional Resource:
I've often wondered what the results of radio exposure gets for small businesses, and if web-based businesses benefit less than local brick-and-mortar businesses.
I've done radio interviews where my website name and URL is mentioned by Me and the radio host several times in a few minutes. The direct results are barely enough to get noticed in the web logs.
For long-term websites, I think you do still benefit form the exposure and the "implied endorsement" of the radio show.
Posted by: Matt | 04/10/2007 at 14:50