How a 204-year-old company succeeds in a thoroughly modern business.
“I was surprised at the high level of clickthrough.” Tony Millen
General Manager Kelly’s Directories
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You can’t accuse Kelly’s, the venerable business directory publisher, of being too traditional. Its well-established print directory, popularly known as “the Big Red Book” for industrial product and part manufacturers, comes out yearly – and has done since 1799. Kelly’s, a subsidiary of publishing giant Reed Elsevier, is the UK’s premier brand for industrial purchasing and supplies. Its database aggregates more than 150,000 companies in 110,000 categories. Kelly’s added a CD-ROM version of the directory in 1989 so users could more easily search the listings on computer. And in 2001, the publisher created a dynamic search-based site, www.Kellysearch.com, for up-to-date listings and faster retrieval. Customers looking for anything from abrasives to water pumps may browse the paper directory, the CD-ROM, or search online among its vast pool of companies and products. Approach Over the years Kelly’s may not have shifted its business focus, but the market has dictated adding various features and changing formats. Today that means the listings must be extremely current, and easily searchable through many detailed technical keywords. That’s why Kelly’s executives moved to emphasise the online directory over the traditional print product. As General Manager Tony Millen says, “We know that our website has grown in importance in the day-to-day supplier/ buyer relationship. It was time to migrate our brand to the web.” He also says that Google advertising was the first choice to enable such a move. “Both Kelly’s and our customer base consider Google the top search engine in the UK,” says Millen, “making it easy to opt for Google advertising, in addition to using Google search as part of our offering.” The Kelly’s sales force regularly combs the UK to get new entries or updates for many thousands of small specialty manufacturers and suppliers. Since basic listings are free, Kelly’s has supported its sales effort by extending the canvass to an increased number of entrants. This in turn enables sales of enhanced listings for the site, making both a more compelling sales tool and end product. In 2002, Kelly’s created a £50,000 Google ad campaign to launch the enhanced Kelly’s Directory through Kellysearch.com. “We wanted to increase visibility for the directory,” Millen says, “and demonstrate the range of products and suppliers to its buyers as well as all those who are listed.” Results What Millen didn’t anticipate was the greatly increased volume of traffic the site would get – or the benefit of defining numerous specialised keywords on which Google users would search. “We chose around 20 keywords like ‘anodizer’ and ‘asbestos’ to start, and worked our way up to 100 of them. In some cases, we saw 10 or 15 percent clickthrough, well above the industry standard. “Over the months the campaign completely exceeded my expectations in number of searches and clickthroughs to our advertiser pages. It yielded an overall clickthrough rate of over 4 percent,” says Millen, more than twice the average. It was this level of response that led him to budget an additional 3 months and 50 percent more money to the campaign.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORIES – KELLY’S DIRECTORIES
“In some cases, we saw 10 or 15 percent clickthrough, well above the industry standard.”
“It was so good, we wanted to continue,” he says. “We even postponed another launch to ride the wave through year-end.” That wave had crested by December 2002 with a total of 5 million impressions on Kellysearch.com through Google. “Our home page impressions grew from about 300,000 in a month at the beginning of the campaign to 3 million in the final month,” he says. “This is traffic from qualified customers who would not have found their specialty producers and suppliers elsewhere. The growth we achieved came from our marketing efforts, in which Google played a major part.”
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