January 30, 2006

Google Pontiac: A Search Call-to-Action

The blogosphere has been abuzz this past week about Pontiac's new TV spot that features a Google screen capture with "Pontiac" entered in the search box. The ad voice-over states "don't take our word for it, Google Pontiac to find out."

Pontiac's spot represents a new form of Internet call-to-action. Rather than driving users to a generic website, or a website created specifically for a promotion, Pontiac's bold new move results in placing control of the end-message in the hands of a search engine algorithm along with sponsored ad listings.

Lets see how this commercial spot has affected searches for "pontiac" and visits to www.pontiac.com.

The blue line represents market share of visits to pontiac.com (in relation to all Internet visits) while the red line represents market share of searches on the term "pontiac" (in relation to all Internet searches). We can see that over the past two weeks, searches for Pontiac have increased compared with the same period last year, which indicates that this "search call-to-action" may indeed be working. Pontiac has proven itself to be forward thinking in cross-media promotion (the spike in April 2005 is related to a Solstice product placement on The Apprentice, tied in with a Yahoo promotion).

This new form of search call-to-action is not without risk however. In leveraging Hitwise Search Term Analysis, we find that while the Pontiac home page received over 69% of the traffic on the search term "pontiac," the second highest site in volume at 2.4%, was www.mx5nocomparison.com, a Mazda site that urges users to test drive the new MX-5 Miata.

Posted by Bill Tancer at 12:27 PM

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