Remember to spell your client's product correctly

Dear Jeep.

Can I please suggest you speak with your digital marketing agency pretty quickly and find out why they can't even spell the name of your flagship motor vehicle?

You would have hoped that the people creating the Facebook Adverts to entice people to view your large family 4x4 would be able to actually spell..... wouldn't you?

Yours

Hayden

Google Hotel Finder pushes results off the screen

Last week I had a quick outburst at Google for managing to take up most of my screen real estate with adverts. This previous posting was based upon a search for car insurance, which left only one organic search result on my 1366 x 768 laptop screen.

So, with the dark launching of Google's Hotel Finder application yesterday to much of the UK's searching traffic, I was keen to try it out. The subject of this particular functionality will probably be discussed in a later post, but for now I couldn't get past one obvious fact...

... that Google's new hotel search tool takes up a lot of space on the page. 

Just take the screen shot above as an obvious example. Here, following a search for "hotel in glasgow" I get a page displaying: pay-per-click adverts, a map showing the location of some hotels in Scotland's fair city and now the sponsored zone that allows me to enter my required date range and 4 price-based links.

But a quick image edit later, you can see what this page looks like if you remove all the adverts.

And this is being gracious, considering the map is a link to another page that has several PPC links in pole position on the page.

So, well done Google, for managing to completely push all organic results off of the screen of my pretty high-specification laptop. Are you trying to do away with the search engine optimisation industry entirely?

The problem with collecting data

Data gets collected all over the place these days:

• Customer feedback questionnaires regularly request and assess views and opinions
• Website analytics capture everything from machine preferences through to individual clicks on each page
• Audience research shows the number of adverts watched in a single evening and the retention of those products the following day.
• In-store ethnographic research identifies trends in purchasing behaviour and the effects of pricing, product selection, promotion and placement.

But businesses and their agencies need to move away from the habit of just retaining data from single channels (e.g. website analytics. TV viewing figures, etc.) and transcend the basic online only attribution models that are currently out there.

They now need to understand the entire user journey that leads not just to a transaction, but to a longer-term relationship. Only then can business truly understand the influence that different devices, channels, proportional activity and other factors (such as peer recommendations) have on purchasing and subsequent behaviour.

But who is linking these sources and others together? Who is trying to pull together the collective understanding from each of the different communication and commercial channels?

Google - just how much is adverts?

In yesterday's post I put up a screen grab of a Google results page for the term 'car insurance'.

Looking back at this image again, I was struck by just how much of the screen is actually covered by adverts. Or to put it another way... what happens if we take the same screen and remove the pay-per-click adverts and link to Google's sponsored promotion for its own car insurance aggregation product.

Quite telling isn't it?