Case Studies

The chart above shows actual client data. This is a particularly interesting and clear case study because prior to and during this period the client marketed only on the Web and only using Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. PPC had been quite successful for the client, but the client felt that professional attention to their PPC program would be beneficial.

As soon as Aderit began work on the account the client's traffic dramatically increased. Correspondingly, there was also a large increase in PPC spending. The large traffic increase was achieved by adding large numbers of relevant terms to the PPC campaigns that the client had overlooked. In our experience, this is entirely normal. While Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing are set up so that companies can create their own PPC advertising campaigns, PPC advertising is so inherently complex that it takes a professional to get the campaings to perform anywhere near optimal levels.

Since the client already had a long track record of PPC advertising and had an established, successful bidding strategy, we stuck with that strategy during the first few days of our work on the campaign. However, it was quickly apparent that the client's original bidding strategy for PPC was unnecessarily high, and that CPC could be dramatically reduced at the cost of only a modest reduction in traffic.

The client sells a product that is a considered purchase. Buyers do not buy it the first time they come to the site. They think about it and research the purchase. Typically it takes buyers anywhere from a week to over a month between their first visit to the site and when they actually buy. At time C the program had been in place a bit more than a week, and the sales improvements began to show.

As the campaign progressed we began to get a usable amount of conversion data. We determined that we had over-corrected a bit on tightening the bidding strategy, and we began analyzing the data to identify where increased bidding increased the ROI. This continued for about half a month until we had dialed into the optimal zone for PPC spending.

Not only did the clients sales double as a result of Aderits enhancements to their PPC program, their sales were much more profitable, too. Prior to the PPC campaign enhancements the client earned $11.25 for every $1 in PPC spending. After the enhancements this improved to $15.50.

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The online marketing efforts of The Enneagram Institute are primarily focused on selling its online personality tests, secondarily to support the sales of its worldwide Enneagram workshops and seminars, and thirdly to sell Enneagram books written or endorsed by Don Richard Riso.

Problem: The Enneagram Institute was beaten to the internet by hobbyist sites, some of which were carrying The Enneagram Institute's copyrighted materials from their books. The Enneagram Institute not only had to play catch up, they had to protect their online intellectual property

Solution: Aderit tracked down online copyright violators and asked them to remove the violating copyrighted materials. With this material gone, Aderit tracked down the sites that had linked to the copyright-violating sites and told them that the material had moved to The Enneagram Institute's site and to update their links. This caused a large number of sites to link to quickly to The Enneagram Institute.

With improvements in on page SEO factors and a massive increase in the number of links, The Enneagram Institute moved in four months from #4 to #1 on "enneagram" on Google - where it has stayed since late '01.

The business results from this have been tremendous.

• Sales of their Enneagram test have tripled
• Traffic has tripled.

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The nature of a hobby business is that delivering the product is enjoyable to the business owner, but the other necessities of a business - such as marketing - are just onerous work. For a hobby business internet marketing can be a dream come true. After a bit of work setting up a website, the customers just come to you.

Such was the case for this Boston nutritionist, Lifestyle Nutrition Management. For her most important keyphrase we were easily able to get her a top ranking on Google for "Boston nutritionist". In addition, we employed regionally targeted Google Adwords for a vast array of terms related to conditions that are nutrition-related, such as weight management.

Now the site owner gets all the leads she can handle, with just a small PPC bill each month.

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Sometimes a business has the opportunity to get its customers to do marketing for them. On the internet this is called Viral Marketing. We found just such an opportunity for The Enneagram Institute.

With the advent of blogging huge numbers of people became instant online publishers. Their favorite topic? Themselves.

For years The Enneagram Institute has offered a free Enneagram test taken by hundreds of people every day. The viral marketing strategy that was implemented was to offer test takers an icon describing their personality type, which they could put into their blogs or personal homepages.

The main readers of blogs are other bloggers. These icons quickly caught the eye of the other bloggers, and they had to take the test and get their icons too. This has been self-perpetuating, causing thousands of sites to link to to and advertise The Enneagram Institute.

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