Does Offline Exposure Work? My Experience

I'm a 99% online person. I eat, breath, sleep online marketing. The paradox is that my consultancy business actually started in its current guise with a press release I wrote over 6 years ago (I was consulting under a different name from 1998). However, I always try and make the most of any opportunities to gain exposure that come may way - and many did come my way.

Earlier in the month I was featured as "Geek Of The Week" on Steve Wright's Radio 2 show. When I heard it I was driving back home up the M6 and was thinking about whether the server could cope, how many sales I'll make etc etc. Then I thought that they haven't mentioned the domain name and they were mentioning my name over and over again so I was wondering how people would split themselves between searching for the product and my name.

So looking at the keywords for this blog over the month it looks like there were only 33 visits to the site with "Easter" in them with an obvious blip when the day of the show:



For those just searching on my name there was probably an extra 8 or 9 visits. So altogether there was no huge affect.

And there was absolutely no traffic to the Easter Eggs site with my name in which was probably a mistake not putting it on there in the first place, however, I could not have anticipated the Radio2 coverage.

Thankfully I had created a Twitter account for the site and it was ranking nicely for the product name and my name so I picked up a few more followers - but nothing special:


As aside, Twitter sent the site 190 visits - but I didn't track out clicks direct to merchants, but I'll be doing that from now on.

Now, I then got some nice coverage in the business section of the Telegraph. But the numpties messed up the link to the site. However, from experience I know that traffic from online versions of newspapers is often woeful so I wasn't worried about that. Furthermore, with the transitory nature link juice of internal pages within newspaper sites and the fact it has no cache means I've not "lost" much on the SEO front.

I was interested to know what impact the article would have on the site's direct traffic. Well it was referenced to on the front page of the business section so I was hoping for a fair bit. In the week before the site was getting around 200 direct visits a day and on that Good Friday it got just over 300 - which I suppose was good as it was a Bank Holiday, but nothing special. What's interesting is that its been fairly constant at around 140 ever since and is now a staggering 1/3 of all the traffic (over the past 7 days).



But, I was wondering about all this extra exposure about Easter eggs offline, I was wondering about if that led to an increased level of traffic from that search term. Now both years I've had top spot in Google UK for that term and 4th in Google global - there's a constant there. Actual traffic from [Easter eggs] was down 26.64% but all search traffic that included "Easter eggs" as part of a search phrase was up 94.08% (against all keywords driving 76.15% more traffic).

So are people going longer and longer tail as many are suggesting? I would say so. Hopefully Heather or Robin at Hitwise could shed some light on that?

I'm going to look at the social media/SEO/email impact on the site next time out and maybe throw in some examples of how keyword use changes as we get up to events such as Easter and Christmas - hopefully you'll find that interesting. I may even look at how conversion rates change by merchant over time too?