November 19, 2009
Google Adwords
2 Comments
If there’s one thing that’s annoying it’s advertisers that are blatantly unaware of wasted money on their PPC advertising in Google. Today brought yet another example …
Many of you will have heard of Peeps – marshmallow sweets full of sugar and stuff, very popular in the USA. Some time ago while in the US, some boxes of Peeps found their way back home and were very much appreciated. Fast forwards to 2009 and an idea pops into the head that it would be good to buy some Peeps because they were so well received before. So, being in the UK, the natural search phrase to type is:
buy peeps online
The intention is to find a UK company that is importing Peeps and then reselling them. Even at a premium, it’s not the money that counts, it’s a ‘must have’ buy in this case.
So, looking at the Sponsored Links in Google you see:
Ignoring the top result, the next two are adverts related to Easter. There are a couple of points to make here:
- Although Peeps are traditionally all about Easter, they’re actually made available for numerous ‘holiday’ type occasions throughout the year. This begs the question of “why, when someone types ‘buy peeps online’ is an Easter advert appearing? We’ll come back to this point.
- Google is displaying two adverts. Does anyone want to hazard a wild guess about whether those adverts are from separate companies or just one? Apparently, according to Google, the PPC system isn’t supposed to allow advertisers to abuse the system and have more than one advert displaying under a single keyword phrase. On the surface, SupaPrice.co.uk and Hot-Prices.co.uk are separate companies but it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see that the adverts are very similar and when you click through to those respective websites, the content of them is remarkably similar as well. This does kind of make a mockery of Google making big claims about ‘quality’ being an inherent part of the PPC system if the system itself is not intelligent enough to identify when two adverts are related to the same company. This has long been the case and we’ve done it ourselves, very successfully, getting a client listed several times for the same keyword phrase, but getting three adverts visible at a time instead of the one when supposedly the system is intelligent enough to work such things out- fantastic for locking out the competition.
Anyway, the purpose of this blog isn’t to highlight the significant flaws within Google’s perception of what is ‘quality’ and what isn’t (in Sponsored Links results) but is instead on point 1 above …
If interested in buying Peeps online and seeing an advert about Easter (even though we’re approaching Christmas 2009), there are two knock-on effects for the advertiser who is displaying their adverts:
- The majority of people who search for such a keyword phrase (or probably many similar) are going to see the advert, think it’s irrelevant, and won’t click. This has the impact of reducing the click-through-rate (CTR) of the advertiser, which means their advert positioning and cost per click will also be negatively impacted.
- Those people who decide that they really want to get hold of Peeps (as was the case this time) click through on the advert (actually, both of the adverts) and find that the websites have absolutely no reference to Peeps at all. Yes, they have references to Easter products but no reference to Peeps (wrong time of the year in this case). The end result: clicks on both of those sites cost both advertisers click costs and they get nothing from it.
So, the lesson here is that anyone who has either in-house PPC people or is outsourcing their PPC and basically have people running it that are extremely lazy, and frankly, stupid, is losing money and damaging their PPC campaigns in the process. So what’s the answer for www.supaprice.co.uk and www.hot-prices.co.uk, who would appear to be German owned? Roll out the firing squad and shoot whoever is responsible for this embarrasment of PPC advertising that contributes to people saying “I never click on the Sponsored Links because they’re often not relevant”, while wasting the budget and success potential of the advertiser.
November 1, 2009
Website Strategy
1 Comment
No, we’re not talking about normal corporate videos here, but something a little bit different. We’re talking about combining your expertise with humour to generate brand awareness and new business.
In the world of website design, development and online marketing, those of us within the industry often witness very similar words coming out of the mouths of potential clients. These words tend to be along the lines of “a website isn’t complicated to create, it’ll cost a minimal amount and it’ll look fantastic if you’ve used the logo created by the one-legged daughter of the bosses half-brother”. That’s why a particular series of videos are particularly amusing to anyone who works within this industry.
Those videos are all available on YouTube and there are many variations. The examples below are probably the most perfectly matched to anyone in the web design/development/marketing industry. Warning: the language is very ‘colourful’!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sU3KaT74JE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfprIxNfCjk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCjcwBGQtiw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyTpzgAW5NA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx14XCNNARw&feature=related
But let’s go beyond the fact that those videos will amuse most people working within the web industry and look deeper at what’s being achieved there. At the end of each video there’s reference to the Xtranormal website, where such videos can be created. When you go to that website, the best page to view is http://www.xtranormal.com/about_state/, which has a video you can play that explains how the system works and also allows you to download the product for free.
And pause …..
At this stage, the company that’s developed the video creation software has put an advert for their product at the end of each video that people create, which is free advertising. They’ve also made it free for anyone to create videos of their own and through those people creating such videos and uploading them to sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and more, further people are seeing their brand name at the end of each video, and so want to find out how they can use the video creation software themselves. There becomes an ongoing Xtranormal brand awareness and although most people would just use the free download to create videos, the more people using the system, the more potential there is to get people to buy into the premium edition. This, of course, is a classic way to build new business – give away something for free and publicise it well, and then make money from premium subscriptions.
Let’s look at this from a different perspective though. Let’s think about YOUR own business …
What is there that you could portray about your line of business, through the medium of such a video creation system? Depending on your business sector, humour could be a great angle – even if you may think the nature of your business isn’t that exciting. In fact, even better if the nature of your business isn’t exciting because if you can make people laugh in a way that’s not detrimental to the ‘real’ side of your business, then that could put you ahead of your competitors.
As an example, someone selling a service could portray that in an amusing way through such videos. It’s not uncommon for many service type businesses to lose out to competitors purely on price but in reality the lower price services often don’t provide the benefits that the client actually needs. A video could portray a discussion between a buyer of that service and the cut-price company that is selling the service. It could be narrated with the buyer asking particular questions about what the service covers and the seller responding with comments about how poor the service actually is, but it’s cheap – to the point of mocking the buyer. However, the buyer doesn’t hear those words because they’re focusing purely on the cost of the service.
Through creating a series of such videos, including reference to your company as being ‘the good guys’ and publicising them effectively, brand awareness can be built and if you’ve made people laugh along the way then even though perhaps only 1 in 100 people will go on to buy from you, that’s still one more than would otherwise have done so.
On the other hand, if you look at those example videos and the Xtranormal software and still don’t see how you could use such systems to capitalise on the combination of fun and video, then feel free to contact us and we’ll give you some free pointers in the right direction.
