This article originally appeared in American Markering Association.
When a tech brand is covered by the media, website visitor session duration is 184% better than paid search, according to a report from Alloy.
When it comes to quality of web traffic for technology brands, coverage from the media beats paid search by a wide margin, according to tech PR firm Alloy's “2019 Technology Marketing Report: The Role of Media Relations in the Sales Cycle.”
Alloy finds that media coverage nets 56.26% more goal completions than paid search. Earned media also increases session duration by 184%, decreases bounce rates by 24.5% and increases pages per session by 103%.
Media coverage also vastly improves SEO, the report finds, as tech companies that earn an average of five or more organic placements each month have 38% higher domain authority and 29% higher traffic from search engines. Ninety-three percent of sales representatives surveyed say that they use the company’s media coverage—including blog posts, podcasts and TV news coverage—all or some of the time.
Even without news coverage, the online newsrooms of tech brands are one of the most important sections of a B2B website, the Alloy report finds. About 6% of all page views were newsroom pages.
“Furthermore, on average, visitors spent 8.12% longer on newsroom pages than other site pages, and they exited the sites from these pages at a 15.24% lower rate,” the report says. Visits end up spending 8.12% longer on newsroom pages than they do on other pages across a tech brand’s website.