18 May 09 Compare the Results

Well done to the guys at VCCP for putting together the Compare the Meerkat viral campaign.  Its good to see a big brand who are willing to take the plunge into a fairly daring campaign with no guaranteed return on investment in the middle of a recession.  So, full marks for implementation, and full marks for content, however the integration of the Meerkat activity into the main search campaigns has been pretty woeful - and it provides a fairly intersting case study into being a victim of your own success.

Patrick Altoft at Blog Storm has already picked up on part of the story here, the fact that Compare the Market haven’t been clever enough to bid on their own story via PPC, which means that their competitors were nicking a shed load of traffic from CTM on the term “Compare the Meerkat” - they’ve started to bid on this today however, so at least they’re making a start at putting things right, however GoCompare have been there for weeks as the only advertiser:

as I said above though, this campaign has not just been a bit of a fail due to the lack of PPC activity to protect traffic, its also been a victim of its own success, and that is partly due to Google adding Suggest to the .co.uk search page on April 1st.

Essentially, Google Suggest appears to add results to its list based on a freshness algorithm combined with the popularity of terms in the number of searches that they attract.  I’ve done a bit of research into this, and the volume of searches that the ten terms Google offers follows the following profile:

Here, the number one and number 4 results get the most searches - this may be due to the number 4 result being a popular alternative subject.  The upshot is though that Google are providing insight into the ongoing popularity of a particular term and promoting it to users.  When you start typing compare into the search box on the Google home page, you get the following:

So successful has the campaign been that the Meerkat is now the top suggestion offered by Google, which indicates that it is getting more search volume and therefore interest than the brand that spawned it.  Of course, CTM will have got a shed load of natural links from the campaign, and it has undoubtedly pushed them up the Google Rankings for their key term “car insurance”, but it is also hurting them in a way because the main Compare the Market website does not rank in the top 10 results for the “compare the Meerkat” term.

To my mind, this is a hideous missed opportunity, and one that CTM should sort out immediately.  I’d recommend them at least putting some Meerkat related content on their website so that they can get a page into the top 10 for the term, because the way I see it, at the moment they aren’t taking fulll advantage of what is available to them.

Overall, its a lesson in integration - integration of social media into a holistic search strategy, and integration of a particular campaign into the overall brand activity that is being carried out.  There is no point in pushing out the most daring viral campaign in the world and getting huge success from it if you don’t fully exploit the results that you have achieved…

Simples

Tags: compare the Meerkat, Link Bait, seo, Social Media