Pay Per Click & Customer Loyalty

There is a quote on ThoughtShapers.com from Craig Swerdloff which questions the lifetime value of a customer driven by paid search vs other channels. To summarize, customers gained through paid search tend to be deal seekers & less loyal to a particular site or merchant than they are to the next deal.

The full post is on Craig's blog.

I tend to agree in regard to the lesser degree of loyalty in the case of deal seekers (on average), but this leads to a different question.

What if we, as publishers, sought to provide a solution or answer a question for the user as opposed to simply trying to sell them something? Is a customer gained because we solved their problem more loyal than one which converted due to effective marketing techniques.

Many well crafted sites do a nice job of converting the visitor into a customer... once in a row. What if the primary goal were to educate the visitor with conversions as a secondary thought. Does the drive for conversions through hard sell conflict with the goal of building loyal visitors?

There is something to this... particularly as it relates to Pay Per Click. On average, Pay Per Click costs will continue to rise. As more money moves from offline advertising budgets to online advertising, it is inevitable. To borrow a concept from physics, two ads can't occupy the same space at the same time. Someone is going to have to step up their game... or (more likely) their bids.

As pay per click costs rise & squeeze margins, those who have worked to build repeat business will have an advantage. They already do.