Monday, May 17, 2010

Just Google It! Advertising, Quad Bikes and CTR

A couple of companies are now running "Just Google It" advertisements - both as sign boards and on radio - loosely based on Imagine! Broadbands WiMax ad (for which they didn't rank until they changed their page title - which I suggested although I doubt they picked that up from me). I think this is quite a clever idea - although I'm not really sure if it's working for them yet.

The most recent ads I've seen are one for an adventure centre (Quad Bikes) in the middle of the country somewhere around Mountrath I think and the new Advertising ad by Advertising.ie. In the first instance, the adventure centre used a person's name (I'm still not sure why it's so common to trade under your name in Ireland but there you go) - which I struggle to remember. Possibly because the name was quite common and that I've never met that person but if it had been Irish Adventure Centre for example, I might have a better chance of remembering it.

The "Advertising" campaign is quite clever - the radio advert demonstrates the companies full range of services but alas, despite registering the domain of the same name, the site ranks #3 in pages from Ireland. Also, I couldn't remember if the ad said "Advertise" or "Advertising" - it turns out it it was the latter - and they don't rank at all for "Advertise".

If you're going to rank #3, then you have to consider the other 9, 18 (including indented), 36 (including youtube, live, suggested, adwords) places that you've now brought people in front of that don't connect to you.

This is what I mean: see the image links and adwords on the side and middle?

The links at the bottom offer video and suggested search.

Certainly, the user will be able to find the site they are looking for - but the online marketing person should have built a wider profile to provide better auxillary results pages to increase the click through rate.

From initial analysis using the Google CTR tool for organic results, we can tell that even if your domain and company name exactly matches the search phrase keyed - unless you have more than one result on the home page, your Click-Through-Rate can be as low as 50%. This is a fary cry from the originally touted 75% average CTR for the #1 position - we haven't seen anything close to 75%.

3 comments:

  1. It's even harder when you are outside of the US. Here in Holland people are sometimes using the Dutch version of Google and sometimes the English one.. So your company has to show up in both search results!

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  2. Always shoot for organic results. The "churn and burn" mentality is about as productive as shooting yourself in the foot before you take a jog.

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  3. This seems attractive at first but its not organic and I think the best to build natural links for your website.

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