Online search marketing boosts business for Debby Burke Optical
Debby Burke Optical saw its business increase 67% last year after it implemented search marketing services from Beyond ROI, roughly triple the 23% year-to-year increase it saw in 2003 over the previous year, marketing manager Farrell Burke tells Internet Retailer.
The company, which started by selling reading glasses at street fairs, added a web site, Debspecs.com, in 1998. Prior to launching an organized search marketing program, it promoted the web site through the street festivals, print catalogs and word of mouth, according to Burke.
Though Debby Burke Optical manages its pay-per-click advertising on major search engines Google and Yahoo directly, Beyond ROI provides assistance in natural search optimization and identifies and directs the site to pay-per-click opportunities on smaller search engines, Burke says; and at a lower cost-per-click than on bigger engines. “They are a lot less expensive, maybe 40 cents a click where we might spend up to a dollar elsewhere,” says Burke, referring to the company`s average cost-per-click on the traffic that comes in through Beyond ROI. “And they get us a lot of traffic. Usually, Beyond ROI is our number three source of hits every month.”
Burke, who says projected sales this year across channels at the company are slightly under $1 million, adds that she has spoken with similarly-sized small retailers who are steering clear of online search marketing because they don’t understand it. “We like to control a lot of that,” she says. “But having Beyond ROI balances out controlling our Internet marketing with relinquishing control to someone else. It’s great to have them because we don’t have technical background, and they pick up things that we miss.”
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