Apr 29, 2008
I heard an ad on the radio for Down Under Insurance. What peaked my interest about this ad was that they didn't give the web address for finding our more information - instead they asked you to Google for "down under insurance".My first thoughts was that this was a bit silly. By sending the user to Google, you are giving them an opportunity to click on another company's listing. Of course, Down Under insurance is going to show up first on a search for "down under insurance", and they do have sitelinks which are hard to go past, but there are still competing Adwords results on the page that users will see.
Radio advertising is damn expensive - if it was me paying for the campaign, I would be minimising the risk of losing that traffic.
.com vs .co.nz
Also, if you enter the query on google.co.nz their .com site is showing up before the .co.nz - surely the New Zealand site has locally targeted content, and surely a New Zealander coming to the site from a radio ad would want to see the New Zealand content?Strategy
Maybe they have some strategy I'm not aware of. I don't particularly like the duinsure.co.nz domain name, so personally I would be sending traffic to downunderinsurance.co.nz - it's obvious, easy to say over the radio, easy to remember, will get the NZ user to the .co.nz site, and with no chance of giving the competitors any extra traffic.I'm struggling to think of why sending the radio listener to Google is a better idea.
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Comments
Rick - May 3, 2008
Could this be so that potential customers are more likely to call even if they only know of the interweb as The Google and don't know what/where the address bar is?
That's the only reason I can think of, except for, as Lynn above mentioned, gloating about ranking #1 for their own company name. Which isn't hard anyway.
That's the only reason I can think of, except for, as Lynn above mentioned, gloating about ranking #1 for their own company name. Which isn't hard anyway.
Jai Ivarsson - May 4, 2008
I agree totally with all the above comments but would like to give a possible reason to do it.
How many people had heard of Downunder Insurance before Harvey's comments. I certainly hadn't. When you are an unknown brand it can be very hard to build trust quickly. A very common way is to give the impression of trustworthiness by being linked with trusted brands. It is one reason why JVM is getting so popular.
It has been reported in many SEO circles about how trusted Google is as a brand. It has also been reported how organic results are trusted far more than ad based results. How to demonstrate that your unknown brand is trustworthy instantly? By instead of giving out your domain, demonstrate that "the most trusted search engine" ranks you at No1. Therefore we must be trustworthy. The best part about it is that anyone can do it, just make sure that your company name is obscure enough that no one would search it unless they were looking for you.
It is just like getting links by commenting on blogs ;)
How many people had heard of Downunder Insurance before Harvey's comments. I certainly hadn't. When you are an unknown brand it can be very hard to build trust quickly. A very common way is to give the impression of trustworthiness by being linked with trusted brands. It is one reason why JVM is getting so popular.
It has been reported in many SEO circles about how trusted Google is as a brand. It has also been reported how organic results are trusted far more than ad based results. How to demonstrate that your unknown brand is trustworthy instantly? By instead of giving out your domain, demonstrate that "the most trusted search engine" ranks you at No1. Therefore we must be trustworthy. The best part about it is that anyone can do it, just make sure that your company name is obscure enough that no one would search it unless they were looking for you.
It is just like getting links by commenting on blogs ;)
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Lynn Bishop - Apr 30, 2008
I spoke to an advertising agent for a local radio station once, he told me about some company that had done the same thing, 1/4 of the way into their advertising campaign they rang up frantic, their website had slipped from #1 place in google, the adverting agent asked me to take a look and see what had happened, since the original SEO didn't know what happened......
The company had had some SEO done, and of course their website jumped to #1 for a couple of weeks, simply because changes had been made on the front page, then since someone like you had blogged about it, and their blogsite was older and ranked better, they had taken over the first position.... Got paid better than the original SEO to fix that problem for at least the rest of the campaign hehehe.... but rep I agree with you bigtime, buy the longer domain name and use that for advertising, and the shorter one for printing on businesscards...