Comments on: The VPAMAZON Voucher – A Story of Missed Opportunities (or: “how not to market on Google”)

By: pinklilith

pinklilith — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 09:45:20 +0000

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…

By: Chris Timson » Blog Archive » vpamazon

Chris Timson » Blog Archive » vpamazon — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:40:51 +0000

[...] they have is an adwords (paid for) listing. The organic search results are all people like myself blogging about [...]

By: jb

jb — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:06:14 +0000

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.

By: jb

jb — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:48:49 +0000

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!

By: Jiminthesun

Jiminthesun — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:27:30 +0000

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…..??