One of the $64,000 questions for marketers has been how to effectively relate offline initiatives to online behavior, and vice versa. While I'm not going to try to answer that question in one post, I did receive an interesting newsletter from Stacey Williams over at Prominent Placement titled "Integrating Search With Offline Marketing", which I thought was worth commenting on.

In the newsletter Stacey mentions, "if your ad agency has come up with five excellent headlines for your next print campaign and you can't decide which is best, pay-per-click can help. You can run multiple versions of your ad creative at the same time and see which message generates the most clicks."

This is a great observation given the fluidity of PPC marketing . You can turn campaigns on and off or create new ones on the fly and be up and running quickly. I responded to her, and mentioned that maybe analyzing your content network click-through rate (as opposed to the search network) could give you even better incite. There is a fundamental difference between someone who clicks on your ad in a search engine (active seeker, looking for what you offer) and someone who clicks on your contextual ads (passive browser, not an active seeker).

If you think about it, contextual ads might be a closer cousin to print ads than search based ads. Much like when you leaf through a magazine and an interesting ad happens to catch your eye; the online equivalent might be that you're leafing through (browsing) a Web site and you notice an interesting headline on a text ad.

Active Seeker:

Passive Browser:

Fortunately, content network ads tend to have a much lower cost per click than search network ads, making it a more cost efficient means of testing your headlines as well.

Certainly this is just one of many creative ways to integrate offline/online data by using search marketing data. It’s merely one of several ways to help answer that $64K question - which, by the way, I heard was actually now worth about 78 Euro's. We can't even get a good exchange rate on questions now! I’m kidding, of course.

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About the Author

Andres Galdames is a business analyst at Lyris. He is an expert in integrated online marketing and pay-per-click campaigns.

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