Over the past several weeks, we’ve been showcasing some of our findings from applying the multichannel lens to one of our client’s marketing programs. The objective of this multichannel analysis is determine the relational impact that various marketing programs (e.g. PPC, display, offline) have on each other, while also providing a holistic view of overall success in context each individual program.

Today, we conclude the series by looking at how our client’s pay-per-click’s (PPC) campaign was impacted by its public relations efforts, especially in the case of an unplanned offline activity which promoted the company to an unknown audience.

Again, this particular client is a major financial services organization. To catch up on this series, check out the preceding articles:

Conversation 1: Introduction – Why a Multichannel View?
Conversation 2: Pay-per-Click vs. Display
Conversation 3: Pay-per-Click vs. Broadcast (TV/Radio)

Conversation 4: PR Impact on PPC Search Volumes

Every offline touchpoint today persuades the consumer to visit a website and learn more about a product or service. So naturally, any offline marketing program – whether it’s print, broadcast, word-of-mouth, etc – will have an effect (albeit indeterminate), on a brand’s online marketing programs.

Public relations teams often coordinate product launches or place their executives for interviews across several mediums and formats, from newspaper articles to brief mentions in a local news broadcast. While many of PR’s programs are thoroughly coordinated from pitch (promoting the idea) to capture (measuring the impact), often times the brand will be promoted without the PR team’s influence – take for example, a reviewer receives and reviews a competitor’s product and mentions your brand’s product in a magazine article, or a financial analyst recommends your brand’s stock on a TV program.

This spike in offline awareness will cause a direct (albeit not proportional) spike in online traffic, as viewers will go online to learn more about your brand. Given this, a successful online marketing team must be agile and forward-thinking enough to create PPC budget controls and account infrastructures to support any influx of traffic.

So to address this issue, we helped our client create flexible bid models for search engine spending, while also creating a PPC campaign management system that cut the channel’s response time to budget changes down to 24 hours. Though a one day window does not seem as real-time as desired, it’s more than enough to allow the brand to capitalize on any significant mentions it receives via offline press, and refine the message accordingly.

Consider the following example – Consumer A is driving in his car one afternoon and listening to the radio when he hears a broadcaster mention your brand in a news story. Consumer A wakes up the next morning and sees your brand mentioned on the front page of her newspaper. The window between these two exposures was within half a day, but the story is still current enough in the consumers’ minds to research the brand some more as the day (or week) goes on.

So when Consumer A  later conduct an online search for your brand, they’re presented with ads aligned with the same messaging that they would have heard on the radio, in a newspaper or any other offline medium. By moving at the viewer’s pace of consuming and acting on information, we were able to better allocate the client’s resources to service them, and provide relevant and actionable results.

We’re continuing to optimize our clients’ marketing initiatives, and constantly aligning our processes with our clients’  processes to ensure we are responding to ever changing peaks and lows of offline marketing activities. The ultimate objective is to help the client become even more agile and accurate in its response to unplanned PR activity, while also creating a consistent persona across multiple platforms.