Last week, BP announced that the company had purchased keywords related to the oil spill to drive traffic to the BP website. For the week ending June 12, 2010, 47% of all traffic to BP.com was driven by search and 22% of all search traffic was from paid search terms. The top paid search term to drive traffic was ‘bp’ followed by ‘bp oil spill’. Queries including oil spill represented 7 out of the top 10 paid terms driving traffic to BP.com. Of all paid clicks to BP.com, Google delivered 90% last week.

Last week, 60% of all visitors to BP.com were new, meaning they had not visited the website in the past 30 days. Google was the largest driver of traffic to BP.com for the week ending June 12, 2010 and delivered 34% of all visits with 68% coming from new visitors. Among the search engines driving traffic to BP.com, Yahoo! Search and Bing ranked 2nd and 3rd behind Google and also delivered a high share of new visitors with 70% and 65%, respectively. In terms of attracting new visitors, the search campaign can be considered successful although whether or not the content has a positive influence is still an unanswered question.