Multi-Channel Marketing and Real Life (Not Predicted) Results

Gerard Tollefsen - December 6, 2010

Working in the online advertising industry, I try my best to stay on top of the latest news and notes.  There are many great resources to lean on, from digital (and print) magazines to blogs written by thought leaders in our field.  Many times they focus on one specific channel and how businesses either need to get into that channel or how they are currently using it.  Other blogs talk about recent news and rumors with the main players in our industry (see Google and the recent talk about acquiring Groupon).

Some of the most informative resources deal with statistics and trends in online advertising.  It is extremely beneficial when recommending a specific marketing channel to a client when I can reference expected expenditures in that channel.  It provides greater relevance by showing the expected growth in the channel I am recommending.  However, the best resources of information are usually the hardest to find…real life performance of businesses implementing multi-channel marketing programs.  While it helps to show expected (or predicted) results when proposing a new idea to a client, nothing beats the real thing.

I have been working with a client for the last 3 years managing a multi-channel marketing program.  We manage their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns through Google AdWords and the new Search Alliance (Bing and Yahoo).  We also handle all of their SEO efforts and Affiliate marketing.  In addition, we manage shopping feeds and remarketing programs on their behalf.  They administer their own social media marketing and blogging, but only after extensive consultation and training by our internal teams.  In other words, we have had a robust multi-channel program in place since April 2008.

I was recently reviewing the program’s overall performance via Google Analytics, and would like to share the following real life (not predicted) results:

Comparing November 2008 to November 2010
Revenue from Direct traffic increased by 137%
Revenue from Google CPC traffic increased by 142%
Revenue from Google Organic traffic increased by 566%
Revenue from *Search Alliance Organic traffic increased by 214%
Revenue from *Search Alliance CPC traffic increased by 101%

Obviously, we grew the programs over time and many of the multi-channel programs were in their infancy stages which somewhat inflated these figures.  To further my point, I went ahead and compared last year to this year (at which time all programs were mature with solid previous statistics throughout the date range comparison):

Comparing November 2009 to November 2010
Revenue from Direct traffic increased by 71%
Revenue from Google CPC traffic increased by 25%
Revenue from Google Organic traffic increased by 65%
Revenue from **Search Alliance Organic traffic increased by 63%
Revenue from **Search Alliance CPC traffic increased by 45%

*For easy comparison I combined MSN and Yahoo stats pre Search Alliance formation*
In these economic times, especially when you factor what the economic climate was like during the time frame of my analysis (November 2008 — today) these are exceptional results.  Basically, my client has achieved record sales growth during one of the most difficult times in our economy by leveraging and aggressively pursuing a multi-channel online marketing strategy and achieving excellent real life (not predicted) results.