Bidding on Matt Cutts as a Keyword
October 26th, 2006 by Michael Gray in Advertising, SEMIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
A few weeks ago Matt Cuts noticed someone was bidding on his name. Being the snarky wise-ass fun loving jovial type I decided to have a little fun. While it wasn’t an especially nice thing to do hopefully I can make up for that by turning this into a learning experience and showing some stats.
First let’s talk about why you would want to bid on a keyword that doesn’t have a direct purchase associated with it. The primary reason is to build branding. Many moons ago I remember reading that your average consumer has to see your name between 8 and 12 times before they start to remember you. But wait aren’t I person and not a brand? Well actually I’m both, and so is Matt. See Matt’s brand that lots of people want to be associated with either in pictures or by claiming they are best friends foreva’. So by bidding on Matt’s name I associated myself with his brand and got noticed (more about this at the end of the post). For more on branding check out Zefrank.
Ok so lets get down to the numbers
So for the campaign I was running three different ads, not something you should usually do, but I was short on time so I had to accelerate the testing. We can see the ads served up approximately an equal number of times but received a different rate of click throughs. The first and third ads are the same except for “Michael Gray” being used in place of “Graywolf”. The first ad had just over a 2.5% higher click through rate, which is important. Why is 2.5% important? Over a long period of time that 2.5% could add up. For example if my add was shown to 10,000 people and 5% clicked through that’s 500 people. However if 7.5% clicked through that’s 750 or 250 extra people who made it one step further closer to conversion. Why did one ad get more clicks? Possibly the Graywolf brand is stronger than the Michael Gray brand and people knew one and not the other. The second ad was an effort to try and be more compelling. While not amazing lets remember I did write it over a bowl of frosted mini wheats while trying to get to kids out the door to school, so it’s not the pinnacle of SEM efforts. Basically I tried to create that sense of urgency the “if you see only one movie this summer see this movie” feel to it.
Now the one thing that I did completely wrong is a classic adwords mistake. I didn’t bring them to a proper landing page, I just dumped them off in the SEO category of the blog. What I should have is “best SEO posts” page like Todd does. Highlighting my best posts and encouraging people to subscribe to my blog or contact me as a consultant. Taking it one step further I should have made it possible to see not only what ad got me the most click-throughs but got me the most blog subscribers or consulting inquiries (conversions).
How would I do that? Using parameters and redirects is quick and easy way like this:
Landing page for ad 1 - http://www.wolf-howl.com/ppc/page1/?ad=google&ver=1
Landing page for ad 2 - http://www.wolf-howl.com/ppc/page1/?ad=google&ver=2
Landing page for ad 3 - http://www.wolf-howl.com/ppc/page1/?ad=google&ver=3
Everyone sees the same content then I track conversions like this:
http://www.wolf-howl.com/jump/?ver=X&url=destinationpage.html
On the landing page I just get the value for version in the parameter and use it to build the destination link. There are lots of other ways to get this data this just happens to be a quick, easy, down and dirty way.
Lastly lets revisit the issue of bidding on someone else’s name. In lots of cases I’d say it’s acceptable to do for example I don’t see a problem with Allstate bidding on Geico as longs they don’t use it the ad (ignoring the mess that trademark bidding is in the legal system). Bidding on an actual person’s name who’s not you is shaky ground and really depends on your intent. For me to bid on Aaron Wall, Greg Boser or Jim Boykin would just be bad form. In this case I will agree bidding on Matt’s name was probably very close to the line, and it’s not something I encourage people to go out and do.
Sphere It
October 26th, 2006 at 9:45 am
Mike,
There is some other dude who tries to be “Tony Rocks” but we all know that’s impossible. We are continually duking it out for top stop in google organic. I should start a PPC campaign saying that tonyrocks.cc does NOT rock. hehe.
Good stuff man…yes you are quite jovial.
October 26th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
Man your posts more often than not get me thinking for hours about “The Game.”
I’m glad I bookmarked you and it’s not because you’re the fun loving jovial type but it helps.
October 26th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
I bid on Matt’s name during the spring to see what kind of volume was there. It looks like it is down substantially since then. Matt, dust off the PR Machine!
October 26th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
I should bid on “Graywolf is not my BFF.”
October 26th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
I think you could secure the #1 slot pretty easily
October 26th, 2006 at 10:52 pm
I once bid on the names of about 50 different venture capitalists and industry gurus to promote my company. It’s a fun technique.
October 27th, 2006 at 9:54 am
Do you run the risk of getting hit with dupe content issues when you’ve got multiple urls all going to the same landing page?
Example:
http://www.wolf-howl.com/ppc/page1/?ad=google&ver=1
http://www.wolf-howl.com/ppc/page1/?ad=google&ver=2
http://www.wolf-howl.com/ppc/page1/?ad=google&ver=3
http://www.wolf-howl.com/the-real-page-that-non-ppc-traffic sees
My “guess” is that this would only become a problem if people started linking to you via that ppc tracking link which they’ve bookmarked or cut.
FWIW, I use this same method of tracking, but was just curious if I’m leaving myself open to potential issues. The thought of using redirects to canonicalize EVERYTHING makes me a bit ill.
Thanks.
October 27th, 2006 at 11:06 am
Nopt if you set up your robots.txt file properly
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=38197&query=landing+page+quality+bot&topic=0&type=f
November 18th, 2006 at 2:58 am
Google Nagetive Marketing Idea?