• by Joshua Stylman , May 15, 2008

Over the years, I've spoken with many marketers who view search as a campaign-driven medium. That is, they have specific marketing goals to achieve over a set period of time: For instance, driving car sales during a seasonal promotion or increasing TV viewers during sweeps week--and they run paid search campaigns focused exclusively on those objectives. When these marketers hit their goals, they turn off their search presence until the next big campaign begins.

There's a fairly obvious problem with this approach: what if someone searches for that company when the campaign has ended? Does the fact that these users are searching during a marketer's "down" time make them any less important in terms of reaching a marketer's end goals?

The solution is maintaining a persistent search presence, sometimes referred to as an evergreen campaign. There's little risk associated with maintaining this type of campaign: After all, you only pay when a qualified prospect clicks through to your site. It's efficient and effective, allowing marketers to continually stay top of mind with their potential customers.

Furthermore, search engines reward campaigns for running over a long period of time. Performance history is a key factor in determining an ad's Quality Score--the algorithm that Google and other engines use to set minimum bids for their keyword auctions. Consistent campaign performance can often lower your bid prices over time, making it even more economical to keep those campaigns active.

But that's not all. Persistent campaigns can also inform your other marketing efforts. Data gathered in an evergreen campaign can help establish performance baselines for event-driven search campaigns.

Persistent campaigns can also help measure the effectiveness of other online and offline initiatives. Established benchmarks from ongoing search efforts make it much easier to identify spikes in paid search clicks from marketing activity in other media, such as TV or print. Those media create the interest, sending users to the nearest search box.

Of course, there will always be a place for short-term paid search campaigns, and marketers should use the tools available to match their messaging to speak to seasonal or event-driven themes. But marketers would be wise to see the value of a core, persistent search campaign that's always on, and always reaching their customers.