Like many b-to-b companies, research instruments maker Caliper Life Sciences uses pay-per-click search marketing as part of its strategy.
But Rob Halpern, director-corporate marketing and communications at Caliper, said one of the issues with PPC marketing—Google AdWords, in its case—is that sending a Web surfer to a site is just the beginning.
“Let’s say you are looking to buy a digital camera,” Halpern said. “You do a search. You see links of interest, including paid results. If you click a paid link, and you get to a page on a Web site and you surf away, that company has no idea who you are based solely on your Web visits.”
He added, “We wanted a way to capture the people who were clicking on our ad.”
Caliper identified Brainshark, a company that provides sales training and lead-generation solutions, to help it capture those visitors. Brainshark has a product that helps companies create PowerPoint presentations as sales tools.
“It was an excellent mechanism for us to create narrated PowerPoint presentations over the Web,” he said. “It also offered a guest book people had to sign in to to see those presentations.”
Working with Brainshark, Caliper pointed its AdWords keywords—500 in total, including terms such as “molecular imaging” and “Kinase profiling”—to the presentations on its site.
“We’ve got a lot of heavy scientific users who are interested in core drug discovery and other life science research topics,” Halpern said. “We know they are out there looking for information. And we’re playing on those keywords, and we’re serving ads that direct people to these pages [who] we are then able to capture.”
“We weren’t capturing any leads through Google AdWords prior to that,” Halpern said. “We can now match up the money we’re spending every month on keywords with leads generated, and the business flows from that.”
Caliper directs potential customers to about 40 different PowerPoint presentations, depending on the search terms used.
Since implementing the program with Brainshark six months ago, Caliper has seen a 200% increase in closed business, Halpern said. Lead generation has increased by 500%, he added, so Caliper has increased AdWords spending significantly—by about 300%.
“Since we have the ability to track,” Halpern said, “we can obviously adjust [our keyword spending] strategically. We can mess around with it and optimize it.”
