November 10, 2006

Product Recalls and Search Marketing

Today we held our second annual search marketing breakfast in London. Friday morning at 9 AM - and the room was packed to hear the latest trends and tips in search. We heard from Bill Tancer, GM for Worldwide Research at Hitwise, Nick Jones, Category Services Director at Yahoo! Search Marketing, David Graham, Search Business Manager at MSN and Dean Harvey, Director at Spannerworks (also famous for his Brighton Daily Photo Blog).

I wanted to expand on something that was mentioned during the Q&A. Bill pointed out that sponsored listings can be used to respond to negative news. He gave the example of product recalls and pointed out that in the US, legal firms have been known to appear among the sponsored listings whilst building a class action suit. (My colleague LeeAnn blogged about this same topic and the Ford recall). In addition to trying to draw people to a website, the paid listings can be used to get the brand message across. This can help brands get their side of the story out to the market. This can be done in detail on the landing page, but the text in the sponsored listing can also be used to communicate a message.

Let's look at a couple of examples. To find the most searched for product recalls, I used the Hitwise Search Term Suggestion report. The following table shows the search queries that include the keyword "recall" entered into search engines in the past four weeks.

The website receiving the most traffic from searches for "sony battery recall" in the past four weeks was Computer Weekly, ahead of Sony. The top websites receiving visits from searches for "dell battery recall" were Google UK News and BBC News, followed by Dell Battery Program.

Let's look back a bit further - in the four weeks to 2nd September 2006, during the peak time for searches for "dell battery recall" 47.86% of searches for that term sent visits to a Dell website (www.dell.com, euro.dell.com or www.dellbatteryprogram.com). That means half of those searchers went to other websites, and as the list below illustrates that news and media websites were most popular.

By taking out a sponsored listing for "dell battery recall", Dell could control the message on the search engine results page and direct consumers directly to the page for information on which batteries were affected.

All told, we had a great discussion and a lively set of presentations. Thanks to the speakers for terrific contributions all round. And thanks to our clients for attending and participating.

For those of you interested in the slides from this morning's presentations - please email me or leave a comment on this blog. Additional background on the "Keibler Effect" which Bill mentioned in his presentation can be found here. And, you can download the Spannerworks eBook on social media that Dean Harvey recommended here.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 04:34 PM
Posted to Branding

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