Why “Shop Honda” instead of “Honda”?
For those that haven’t seen the latest TV ad from Honda, at the end thy ask the viewer to search for “Shop Honda” on Yahoo. Why not just have them search for “Honda”? In fact, the same enhanced result comes up for both searches, so why add the word “Shop”?
I can think of a couple reasons.
- By typing in the word “Shop”, they are putting the person in the shopping mindset. They’re telling the user that you can shop on the Honda website. Subtle, but good, but the most important reason is
- Tracking. This is a brilliant idea from an analytics stand-point. Every company that produces TV ads wants and needs a way to measure how effective they are. By asking viewers to type in “Shop Honda” instead of just “Honda”, it allows them to see the increase in referrers for this specific term. If they have a baseline for daily/weekly/monthly searches for the term, by asking viewers to specifically type it in, they can measure the increase, and make assumptions based off that increase.
Ironically, none of this is relevant on any other search engine (only applicable on Yahoo). It may have been prudent to review this prior to launching this campaign. Here’s why.
When I type “Shop Honda” into Google (or MSN), the number 1 result is for an Australian site selling Honda motorcycles, lawnmowers and generators. Unfortunately, the Honda PPC ad is #3, meaning they’re probably not getting a lot of traffic. I would LOVE to see the increase in traffic for the Australian motorcycle site. I’d be willing to bet the site will be down at some point during this promotion due to a flood of unqualified traffic.
To sum it up: Love the thought, but see room for improvement on the execution.
Although it is great that Yahoo was able to provide Honda with this synergy, don’t forget the other search engines. At the least, supplement it with additional spending in the paid space.
March 28th, 2008 at 12:51 am
Wow, is that a bad first result for Google, I’d half expect to see a manual fix on that soon.