Content Findability: keyword, not URL

27 February 2008, 21:00

In making a purchasing decision a buyer will go through a process often expressed as "AIUAPR". This acronym stands for the phases a buyer almost always moves through before laying out the cash...

  1. Awareness
  2. Interest
  3. Understanding
  4. Attitudes
  5. Purchase
  6. Repeat Purchase

Despite the rise of the internet and all the hype surrounding Google etc there is still no advertising medium quite as good at raising awareness for the average consumer as TV. Other advertising mediums such as radio, outdoor and ambient media still have their niches in ad buyer's media mixes, however along with TV all these often fail at the "Interest" stage and have almost definitely finished being consumed before the potential buyer has hit "Understanding". This is why infomercials and home shopping channels whose revenue depends on people handing over the cash there and then spend so long describing each apparently simple (and usually crap) product.

Therefore the best way to ensure your "Awareness" and "Interest" spend is more likely to be converted into a sale, by moving the buyer down this decision chain, is to provide more information than you can fit in the average TV/radio/outdoor advert. A website of course can fulfill this task well by conveying a lot more information about a product than these traditional adverts ever can - often presenting such information in a more persuasive form with interactivity.

The problem therefore is getting your potential customer to traverse from offline to online - the advertising time is expensive and URLs you have to convey to users are complicated beasts...

h-t-t-p-colon-forwardslash-forwardslash-w-w-w-dot-your-brand-dot-co-uk

Marketeers, rightly, become particularly hung up on conveying their URL if their product is purchasable at the website or, even worse, the URL is the product. This usually results in inane adverts where the URL is repeatedly barked at the user, and inevitably people take the piss on YouTube...

There are ways to optimise the URL, of course - such as reducing the length by not mentioning the "http://" and/or "www.", or use of mobile shortcodes to request information. The use of branding slogans as URLs is also prevalent - a practice I always think is quite shortsighted and appears to usually be the advertising agency getting wrapped up in the campaign not seeing the bigger picture of their customer's brand.

Recently I've been seeing everyone from criminals to the government giving prompts to use search engines with specific keywords, rather than just giving a URL, in order to get their audience to more in-depth content that supports the agenda they are pushing. Just as companies use the limited information put in adverts to seed interest in a product, this new breed of advert is aiming to provide a simple pointer further their influence by getting people to seek out more data.

Here are some examples...

Act on CO2

The UK government's "Act on CO2" campaign spans several mediums - most notably quite a few high-profile TV spots. Note at the end, the call to action is "Search online for 'Act on CO2'" rather than a URL.

Grassroots Protests

Google Building 7

"Building 7" is a reference to 7 World Trade Center, a building that was destroyed in the terrorist attacks on 11th September 2001. Conspiracy theorists argue that the building was reduced to rubble in a controlled demolition, then the media covered this fact up. Whatever you think of these theories - the use of 'google' as a verb is interesting as it provides a simple shortcut to show that the information is available online, and it's many locations (over 67m search results at the time of writing - with wtc7.net, the top one).

Google Tazbar

In this example, a protest auction on eBay, the person pushing information has used a reference to web search over a URL, or even a link. This may be because their HTML skills aren't very good - but the result is arguably just as persuasive.

Scientology Protest

Here we can see a Scientology protester holding a sign promoting anti-Scientologist content. Apologies for the quality of the video capture - I can't read it either

So what is the upshot of this? The first of the obvious risk of the user not making it to the content you expected them to. A Googlebombing (or just some shrewd SEO) by someone with a different agenda could modify the search results. This is arguably quite difficult as the original website will probably be linked to more often by higher quality sources than an alternative or opposing website - as they have the head start.

One way people can hijack your advertising is the use of sponsored links. On Google in the UK we can see this, where people advertising carbon offsetting and wind turbines have advertised. Interestingly, the last link is some chancer with the completely unrelated tyre puncture protection product. Obviously the people who have shelled out for the TV adverts have more financial clout than your average sponsored link buyer - so they can easily outbid anyone with different motives.

It's impressive to see advertisers of the legitimate and (arguably) illegitimately using this technique to move buyers down the purchase decision chain - after all, it is how users find content organically on the net.

Jason Cartwright RSS Feed

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Jason is a web developer living in London, working for Google and Ferrago Ltd.

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