Integrated search marketing case study – Part 2 Search and Summary

Filed in Asset Management

Putnam Investments was recently named 2009 top mutual fund family by Barron’s/Lipper. This is part two of a case study on how Putnam is leveraging that #1 ranking in their integrated search marketing to see if we can all learn a thing or two.

Read on to see where Putnam has either excelled or fallen short of a great integrated search marketing opportunity.

Be sure to check out integrated search marketing case study Part 1, where I describe the discovery of Putnam’s integrated search marketing effort.

Part 2) Search Response to Putnam Display Ad Banners and Barron’s article:

Many internet users would not follow an online display ad. In fact, based on a study in 2009 commissioned by iProspect and executed by Forrester Research, entitled “iProspect Search Engine Marketing and Online Display Advertising Integration Study”, 27% of users will perform a search as the initial response to an online display ad. Therefore, I decided to simulate what 27% of users might do. So, what did I discover and how well did Putnam do addressing search engine marketing?

Utilizing Google as my search engine, two searches were executed.

The search #1 utilized the terms “putnam 2009 rankings”.

Google search #1

Excelled:

Executing the search #1 for “putnam 2009 rankings” resulted in a sponsored search engine marketing (“SEM”) ad copy, highlighting the term Putnam.

Fallen Short:

Putnam lacks any presence on the first page of Google’s results. It is unlikely that Putnam has undertaken some organic search engine optimization (“SEO”) to get their main homepage listed on the first page of Google’s results.
Clicking on the Putnam sponsored search engine marketing ad copy took the user to the generic Putnam homepage, instead of a custom landing page.
Putnam should have at least brought the user to the same landing page as what was utilized in the Doubleclick display ad banners found on the Barron’s site. Putnam could have optimized a landing page even further since they would have access to the search terms utilized in Google.

The search #2 utilized the terms “putnam 2009 mutual fund rankings”.

Google search results #2

Excelled:

Putnam’s main homepage was found as the tenth search listing. However, this is not likely due to any attempt at organic search engine optimization.

Fallen Short:

Putnam has no sponsored search engine marketing link for the terms entered in this, search #2.
In fact, one of their competitors, AmericanCentury, has a sponsored search engine marketing ad copy that appears.
As a result, Putnam has potentially driven some of their search engine referrals to a competitor by also not doing keyword ad buys for “mutual funds“, which are the only terms which differ between search #1 and #2.

Summary:

Keyword research on Putnam

As an asset management company, Putnam has the beginnings of an integrated search marketing and display ad capability. For that, their marketing team should be commended.
However, Putnam must continue to evolve their marketing capabilities and address both their sponsored search engine marketing as well as organic search engine optimization.
Based on a check-up of Putnam’s activities over at KeywordSpy.com, it is apparent that Putnam is running over 240 search engine marketing ads, with the largest click-through rate for purely branded keywords of “putnam investments”.