Enter “VPAMAZON” or “VPAMAZON2” into Google to get these great offers, said the promo slip, that arrived with my Amazon book in the post today. It was advertising premium business cards.
I was intrigued by this marketing tactic. Was the advertiser sure that no one else would muscle in on his preferred search terms? So I went and searched for vpamazon, and what I found was even worse than someone muscling in on your turf: it was the advertiser themselves not using their own term in an effective way:
If you look carefully, you will notice that there is a paid ad at the top promoting 90% off business cards, which is where the promoter wanted you to look. The problem with this approach is that most people’s eyes are trained to skip ads, and would look at the organic search results first. There they will see a link to an empty website (a Wordpress tag that is empty), and probably now this blog entry.
Even as a savvy web user I went to the Wordpress entry first. Only when I was confused by not finding anything, did I look at the advertising at the top, though some people would miss that altogether. Organic results tend to get most of the eyeballs.
And how to remedy this problem? Easy - just create a page on your site using the terms vpamazon and vpamazon2 like I did here. Duh! Why the advertiser didn’t think to do this before launching an expensive Amazon campaign is quite strange indeed… Perhaps now they will…
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Jiminthesun // Jul 18, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Brilliant highlight of mindless marketing…….in fact as I get my google.com via a french server, the paid ad doesn’t even reach me…..only your blog….could it be more ironic…..??
2 jb // Jul 22, 2008 at 12:48 pm
yup i was also interested in the form of linkage/marketing they were using having received my amazon order, and i also wondered about the possibility of other companies hopping on and using their advertising — muscelling in as you say. i like the idea of giving people as small/short an amount of stuff to type in to use you, but this is clearly disastrous. why on earth didn’t they just forget this whole crap and put vistaprint.com/amazon instead? i know a surprising number of people are inclined to use the google search box (either one built into their browser, or if google is their start page by dafault) in preference to the browser’s address bar for urls/addresses! so there is some logic to what vp are doing but it’s gone pair shaped for sure.
i was wondering, when i first saw it, if this is something i could copy (for my web development / marketing tool company i’m starting). not now having tried to use it. even if vp had put a page with it’s title including vpamazon i still think there’s too much opportunity for it not working. just provide an url for goodness sakes!
3 jb // Jul 22, 2008 at 1:06 pm
also,
> Enter “VPAMAZON” or “VPAMAZON2” into Google to get these great offers, said the promo slip,
they don’t actually say that they say “To redeem this offer, go to: http://www.google.co.uk and search for: vpamazon”. so they’ve specified an url to go to anyway. i suppose they couldn’t just say “go to google and search for vpamazon” because some people may not know google’s address, so they had to specify it, which begs the question, why didn’t they just specify their own address? instead of all this hoop jumping.
4 Chris Timson » Blog Archive » vpamazon // Jul 24, 2008 at 3:40 pm
[...] they have is an adwords (paid for) listing. The organic search results are all people like myself blogging about [...]
5 pinklilith // Sep 9, 2008 at 10:45 am
Proving your point further (thought I suspect there is no need) yours was the first site I looked at, I never even noticed the advert at the top…
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