BP’s use of search engine marketing as a PR strategy netted its company website a 60% increase in traffic over the past week, says Hitwise.
Last week BP launched several PPC campaigns on a huge range of keywords related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the gulf of Mexico, purchased from the three major search engines (Yahoo!, Bing and Google). The company purchased everything from small, simple terms (“Oil spill”) to long-tail queries such as “Oil spill gulf of Mexico 2010″.
The links in the ads take users to BP.com’s front page, which featured live updates from the company on the disaster and the clean-up operation.
Although the cost of BP’s massive purchase of keywords from Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCentre and Yahoo! Search Marketing is unknown, the campaigns appear to have achieved their goal of driving traffic to BP’s website. Hitwise reports that for the week ending June 12, BP.com saw a 60% increase in new visitors with 47% of all traffic driven by search.
The ROI of their campaigns is likely to be fairly low though; only 22% of search traffic was driven by PPC ads. The paid search term which drove the most traffic to BP.com was ‘BP’, followed by ‘BP oil spill’. The platform that was the biggest driver of paid clicks was Google AdWords, which delivered 90% of all paid clicks to BP.com.
Google was also the largest driver of traffic to BP.com when organic traffic is included, delivering 34% of all visits with 68% coming from users who hadn’t visited the site in the past 30 days. Yahoo! Search and Bing came in second and third respectively, with 70% and 65% of their respective upstream traffic from new visitors.
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