PR Campaign Delivers Greater Return on Investment Than Pay-Per-Click Advertising, MEC Labs finds

ATLANTIC BEACH, Fla. – A new research brief released today by MarketingExperiments.com (MEC) announced that public relations campaigns can cost less and deliver better returns on investment (ROI) than pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns.
The research brief is currently available for free in the Marketing Experiments Journal (http://www.marketingexperiments.com/pr.asp).
“As marketers, the results of this research were definitely unexpected and fascinating for us to analyze,” said Flint McGlaughlin, director of MEC Labs. “It proves that there is a place for both PPC advertising and public relations in online marketing campaigns. It’s eye-opening to think that there are a lot of companies out there misguidedly using all of their marketing dollars on PPC when they should maybe be looking at PR to help them get more online exposure and results.
“To learn, through our research, that press releases can deliver a better ROI than PPC advertising and that press release distribution can improve any online marketing campaign – well, it’s just new and exciting for us.”
Over a six-month period of time, MEC tested nine news releases covering various topics that were sent out over professional and free newswire services. MEC tracked the direct incoming traffic and backlinks on its site as well as the interview opportunities that resulted from each press release. It also compared the average cost per visit associated with each news release versus both the cost per visit associated with its average optimized PPC campaign and the cost per click for relevant targeted keywords in Google.
Results showed that the cost per click of the public relations efforts was less than the cost to drive traffic to the site through purchasing keywords in a PPC campaign. They also demonstrated that the news releases created significant spikes in site traffic and helped to create a five-fold increase in the number of incoming links to MEC’s site.
“Our research is specifically relevant to many companies who are already engaging in PPC campaigns but feel they have hit a wall in terms of driving more traffic to their site,” McGlaughlin said. “Press releases are extremely under-utilized in the online marketing industry, and using them strategically can produce visible results. Marketers need to realize that distributing press releases is something they can do that will make a difference and help them punch through to the next level.”
MarketingExperiments.com, an online research laboratory, was named one of 2005’s best online marketing sites by KnowThis.com and is dedicated to discovering “what really works” in Internet marketing. MarketingExperiments.com tests every conceivable methodology to determine which online strategies and tactics are the most successful to improve conversion, drive traffic and sell product. Results of its experiments are published online in the Marketing Experiments Journal.
Those interested in finding out more about using press releases to enhance their online marketing programs can visit: www.MarketingExperiments.com.
About MarketingExperiments.com
MarketingExperiments.Com (MEC) is an online marketing research laboratory dedicated to discovering “what really works” in Internet marketing. MEC engages in primary and secondary research and publishes results in The Marketing Experiments Journal. To conduct relevant, practical experiments, MEC partners with clients such as the New York Times, Reuters News Service LLC, and USA Health Care. MarketingExperiments.com is a member of the MEC Labs Group and a division of Digital Trust, Inc. For more information, please visit www.MarketingExperiments.com.