Why search campaigns can be risky

In a previous life in the UK, one of my colleagues used to run fairly sophisticated “search campaigns”.

The idea was to run banner ads, TV ads and print ads which didn’t have an explicit call to action in the ads themselves but instead encouraged people to search for a “campaign keyword” on search engines like Google.

People would search for the magic keyword and see either a number one ranking result organically for the campaign keyword (note this requires preparation time and can be risky) or a Google ad.

The reason was pretty simple; usually banner clicks cost a lot of money when you’re running a cost-per-click model, and Google ads can be cheap, especially when you’re bidding on a non-competitive keyword.

National Australia Bank has had a ping at this approach in the last week or so and it’s been fascinating to watch its progress.

Here’s a screen grab of the TV ad they’ve been running (by the way, you can find the ad here at YouTube).

So far so good.

Dutifully I headed off to Google and searched for the word “asterisk”.

When I first saw the Google result just after the campaign launched, the only Google ad showing was NAB’s.

A couple of days later and the clever online marketing people at Bank West hijacked the campaign and ran their own Google ad with the line: “We’ve saved the Asterisk”!

Not sure how you can save something that’s reportedly been killed, but that’s for them to sort out.

I’m also certain that there’s a pretty serious bidding war going on between the two banks where NAB is paying through the nose to maintain its number one Google ad rank and Bank West trying to take them out! Good thing they’ve both got deep pockets.

Just like the way lawyers always seem to be the winners in court battles, in this fight Google will be laughing all the way to the, er, bank.

Another small “flaw” in NAB’s campaign approach (or perhaps more of an oversight) is the fact they seemingly forgot to advertise on the other two big search engines in Australia, Yahoo and Bing.

OK, Google has the lion’s share of the search market, but the whole thing would be a bit of a mystery for the folks who wandered over to Bing or Yahoo to find out why they needed to search for “asterisk”.

So all in all, not a bad attempt, I’m giving NAB a 6.5/10 for execution and Bankwest a 10. Great hijack, wish I’d thought of it myself.