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