The Real ROI of the Press Release | BNET (and some odd logic)

A year and a half ago, if you had tried to Google either the Next Level Wellness Center or its founder, Dr. Vasili Gatsinaris, you would have had to wade through 16 pages of search results to find the first mention of either one of them. Then in early 2008, the company’s publicist Donna St. Jean Conti began issuing monthly press releases for $200 each through PRWeb, a wire service that distributes releases to 30,000 online publishers. Total amount of press coverage the releases generated? One mention in a local magazine — but that’s not the point. When the press releases started popping up on page four of Google search results, Conti knew the investment had paid off. “Our primary goal was to make it onto Google,” she says.

Let’s do the maths on the above. Assume early 2008 = January 2008, then Donna has spent around $3800 on press release distribution (this doesn’t take into account the money spent on writing the releases). It is stretching it a bit to say that getting to page 4 on Google is “the investment paying off”. Nobody looks at page 4 results. But if you look at what comes top for a search on “Vasili Gatsinaris”, it is indeed a PRWeb release. Then again, what about search volume on the terms mentioned? According to Google, broad match searches on “Vasili Gatsinaris” total one (1) per day. Perhaps that’s the company themselves checking to see where they are on Google? Search ranking without reference to search volume (or indeed the target audience) is a pretty fruitless exercise.

PS Mr Gatsinaris’ LinkedIn profile could do with beefing up http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/vasili/gatsinaris