The landing page for Snickers’ search ad campaign.Image source.
Snickers has launched a new search ad campaign that relies on people misspelling words in their Google searches. The company purchased Google ads for misspelled terms so when a searcher enters one into the search bar, he or she will see the Snickers’ ad.
According to Mashable, Snickers’ bought about 25,000 terms for the campaign. When one is typed into the Google search bar, the user sees an ad that states: “Oh Deer. Its Hard to Spel When Your Hungry. If You Keap Making Typing Mistakes, Grab Yourself a Snickers Fast.” The ads direct users to YoureNotYouWhenYoureHungry.com.
To determine which words to purchase, Snickers’ applied an algorithm to a list of 500 commonly searched terms to create a list of more than 25,000 misspelled versions of the words.
The clever campaign depends on the hundreds of thousands of typos in search terms used every day. It also brings the brand to the front page of more search terms, which may not all be directly related to the candy bar.
It’s reported that the strategy has successfully placed ads in front of about 500,000 people in just three days. The company also says that this audience represents Snickers’ target market.
Google’s Search Ads
If you’re not familiar with Google’s search ads, they are essentially a way to tie ads to search terms. A business can purchase certain keywords that will trigger their ad displays in a users’ search results. Google offers several types of search ad extensions, such as comparison ads and media ads. Businesses can even display products and their address through product and location extensions.
Usually, a business will purchase keywords its target market is likely to search for. Keywords that are products, services, needs and phrases that include locations are all conducive to this type of marketing. The idea behind search ads is that if a person is searching for terms related to a specific business, he is more likely to become a customer when he sees a related search ad and clicks through to the company’s site.
When someone searches for one of 25,000 misspelled words, a Snickers ad, like this appears.Image source.
Will it Work?
A video released by the company explains that the campaign is intended to target bored office workers who may miss social media ads if their office has blocked the sites. Of course, these aren’t the only people that are likely to see the ads.
The idea is relatively simple but it could bring huge results. All things considered, it’s hard to imagine what kinds of search terms a company like Snickers’ would want to target when buying Google Ads. Words like “candy UK” or “chocolate UK” are very broad, and one has to wonder if ads associated with those terms would be effective. It could also be the case that Snickers has already purchased more relevant keywords, and this campaign is meant to be an additional search marketing effort.
With this campaign, Snickers is able to reach a very large audience in a short amount of time. According to its claims, it’s also able to reach its target market. While this type of campaign wouldn’t work for many companies, Snickers may have found a unique tactic that could help the company reach more people through search marketing, increasing its revenue.
Let’s start the weekend off with what is arguably one of the most adorable things spreading like wildfire across the Internet at the moment. You won’t be able to stay angry at the horrible British summer rain once you’ve seen this.
YouTube Comments Censor
Following on with the silly theme (I have some serious new coming up, honest) if you’ve ever grown angry with the relentless drivel that can be found in the YouTube video comments section, fear not, there is a chrome extension out there with your name on it! The Herp Derp web extension takes all the usual offensive YouTube comments and turns them into harmless Herp Derps which I’m sure you will agree are much easier to stomach. No more “omg justin bieber”, no more “FIRST” and no more “your dumb”.
iPad & Nexus Drop Test
If you’re in the market for a tablet computer at the moment, no doubt you’ve done your research into which one offers the best storage, connectivity and screen resolution. But did you ever think about the drop test? The team at SquareTrade have dropped an iPad and a Nexus 7 so you don’t have to! The results are incredible! Check out the video, and then enter the competition to win a free Nexus 7.
Google Revenue Up
Great news for Google as they’re up in Q2 by 35%, giving them a net income of $2.79B. This is largely down to bringing Motorola into the Google family, and increased interest due to the release of the Nexus 7.
Targeted Tweets
Advertisers can now target their promoted tweets at specific Twitter users. They’re calling the new featured targeted tweets, and it allows brands to only target specific groups of their followers. For example, BA sent a targeted tweet just to their UK followers.
Promoted Vs. Sponsored
SEOMoz gives us a guide to the effectiveness of Facebook promoted stories versus Facebook sponsored stories.
Be Careful What You Tweet
One fan learnt the hard way that if you don’t have anything nice to tweet, don’t tweet anything at all. A fan was kicked out of an MC Chris show for sending a negative Tweet about the performers support act. After a twitter storm with the hashtags #TeamProNicky #TeamProMCChris exploded on Twitter, the rapper eventually apologised to the fan for his harsh actions.
Privacy Explored
We’ve all heard the warnings about sharing too much information online, but what do social networks actually know about us. This infographic aims to dispell the myths and clue up social network users on the type on information stored about them.
The Farcebook fiasco has been dominating headlines over the past week – at the moment the stock price stands at 33.03 which is up 1.03 (3.22%) which shows an improvement over the drastic plummet we saw following the IPO. As more and more information seeps to the surface, the consequences for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook, and the investment banks involved in the IPO are looking bleak as the case is now under scrutiny by Senate lawmakers. Some are predicting the slow decline of Facebook as ad revenue dwindles.
In a bizarre and unexpected move, Facebook released a camera app this week, leaving many wondering why they forked out all that money for Instagram. The app was developed independently of the Instagram team, leaving many questioning if they’re hoping to replace Instgram, or simply see what options are available for a Facebook integrated camera app.
Google has received an unprecedented number of requests to remove URL’s which contain material which infringes on copyright law. More requests were made last week than in the entirety of 2009. In Google’s Transparency Report, we can see that in the past month there have been over 1.2 million URLs requested to be removed from over 24,000 websites.
Stephen Fry used his Twitter superpowers for good (yet again!) yesterday as he helped to drive The Big Tweet for missing children or organised by @missingpeople This further highlights the way technology has changed the world around us, even down to the way search for missing people – gone are the days of faces on milk cartons (although, I don’t think we ever did this in the UK – but Mashable wrote a very good article about it, so I’m going to use the phrase.)
Weeks after the launch of Google Penguin, the Wall Street Journal is looking at the ways the changes to the search algorithm have hurt small businesses. Although not guilty of keyword stuffing, they’re not active in content generation, meaning being present is no longer enough, you have to speak up too.
And finally, were you getting tired of seeing Zooey Deschanel try to order tomato soup? Apple has released their latest Siri advert with the wonderful John Malkovich pondering the meaning of life. John and Siri – a perfect match, wouldn’t you say?
Data released by bit.ly, the URL shortening service used across the majority of social media sites, has revealed the best time for you to change pins into clicks. If you’ve been ardently pinning away from your desk during office hours then your pins may be less effective that they would be if you were pinning at the weekend, Saturday morning, to be more specific.
This was revealed by Hilary Mason, Bit.ly’s chief scientist, at the Mashable Connect conference in the Florida. Bit.ly keeps track of all links created by users, and all the click they recieve. However, as one sharp shooting reader pointed out, Pinterest regularly blocks links from bit.ly as they’re so often abused for spamming, so this could have diluted their data.
That said, it’s still logical advice, as Saturday mornings have done away with breakast in bed and been replaced with ‘iPad in bed’. So how can you pin effectively for your business without giving up your Saturday morning for work?
Chocolate Chip Bacon Cookies - only on Pinterest!
It’s still early days, but there are sites and applications in developement to help you organise your Pinterest boards in the same way you schedule your Twitter feed. If you jump on the waiting list for Pinerly and then leverage your social media prowess to convince others to sign up too, then you could become a member much sooner than the average joe.
Pinerly will allow you to track who you’re following, who follows you, schedule your Pins for busier times, and see your ‘pinalytics’. The only flaw at this point seems to be the iniability to keep your company branding. The only way for Pinerly to track your pins at this stage is for the pins to look like they’re coming from their server, which isn’t much use if you’re trying to drive traffic to your site.
If you’re underwhelmed by Pinerly, or simply don’t want to wait for the invite, there’s always WPPinner that will allow you to view your Pinterest analytics from your WordPress dashboard.
What time do you find most effective for pinning content?
It’s that time of year when the big kids and the pranksters come out of the woodwork with their bags of tricks and leave us with our palms on our faces cursing our gullibility. April Fool’s has become a holiday which allows the big guns to have a little fun and show us that they don’t always take things too seriously.
Before the digital age dawned, our April Fool’s arsenal may have included moving a friends car and pretending it was stolen, or telling your parents you’re pregnant. Now it can take months of planning and, if you’re Google, a whole lot of app development. Many are claiming that the Internet has ruined April Fool’s day, but I think it’s improved it. Yes, our April Fool-dar may be on, and we may know instantly that we’re being had, but that doesn’t stop it from being entertaining.
Here’s a round-up of some of the best April Fool’s pranks from around the web…
Westjet, a Canadian airline, read our minds and offered us something we’ve always wanted: Child-free cabins. Imagine the peace and tranquility, but alas, this was only a (very well executed) prank.
Conan O’Brien ousted Pete Cashmore as CEO of Mashable, a move we all saw coming. In an effort to shake things up, Conan introduced us to the manual tweet – a method which solves two of Twitters main problems; it doesn’t use paper, and it’s too fast.
Ikea released this amusing product recall; those pesky left handed allen keys!
Google took things to a whole new level and released an abundance of brilliant videos: my favourite, GMail tap. Blending the old with the new: it’s morse code for your smartphone.
And finally, take a trip over to Google Maps and check out the new 8-bit NES quest edition. Not content with just making an amusing video about it, Google went ahead and made the whole damn thing. And it’s a beautiful blast from the past.
So, should April Fool’s be a part of your marketing campaign? Of course! So if you missed out this year, better get planning for next year.
And if you were wondering – my post about the over-optimisation penalty wasn’t a prank - that’s actually happening. Sorry!
Following on from the Pinterest dilemma, which shows no signs of being resolved any time soon, we have to ask: does the Internet need a standardised code to ensure credit is given where credit is due? If the code was universally recognised and widely used, then finding the original source of shared content would be a cinch.
With blogging, micro-blogging, content sharing and content curation being the current “big thing” in internet trends, BrainPickings.com founder Maria Popova has proposed we use icons to clearly show where we found the content we’re sharing and curating.
The two symbols ᔥ and ↬ represent a ‘via’ and a ‘hat tip’, both of which are widely established terms used by bloggers and internet folk alike.
A via link shows that you found the content directly, so this would be used if you post an image on your blog, or use a quote from a press release.
via: Wired.co.uk
The hat tip symbol would be utilised to demonstrate an indirect link, where the content you are sharing is derivative of an original source. So if you used a blog post as the starting off point for your own post, you would attribute it with a hat tip.
Again, I reiterate that these are already established and widely used terms within the blogging community. So, why does Popova assert that we need to use the symbols?
In reality, Popova is just highlighting that more needs to be done to ensure content is correctly and fairly attributed; the symbols and the fancy website are just placeholders for this message.
In a blog post she writes:
“The Curator’s Code is an effort to keep this whimsical rabbit hole open by honoring discovery through an actionable code of ethics — first, understanding why attribution matters, and then, implementing it across the web in a codified common standard, doing for attribution of discovery what Creative Commons has done for image attribution.” ᔥ
The suggestion that we need such a code has angered some, with Mashable’s Christina Warren tweeting:
“The Curator’s Code is the most idiotic, histrionic and self-serving pseudo ideal I’ve seen in a long time.”
And later:
“And for the record, I via like a mofo, I don’t need some lamea** symbol.”
Her discontent is understandable; the suggestion that we need a Curator’s Code is the equivalent of accusing bloggers of not being fair in content crediting.
So, fellow bloggers, are you doing your bit to keep your content fairly attributed? And how do you feel about being told you should be using a specific symbol to make sure you’re doing it right?
The Oscars happened this week, which means the rest of the world ceased to exist for one whole night as we turned out attention to the more worthy beings on this planet. To keep you up to date and in coversation loops, I’ve trawled through over 2000 stories on my Google reader to bring you a round up of this week’s news.
Speaking of the Oscars- Poor Angie has been mocked in a most cruel fashion and has spawned a whole host of Internet meme’s. Her perfect pins have been talked about far and wide; from Mashable to Hellogiggles. We’re just jealous. Really.
Here’s what else you may have missed in the big old Internet world…
Mobify, a Candian company, has launched a tablet optimisation tool which aims to improve the user experience when your website is viewed on a tablet.
And this is a big deal, since the world is now eagerly anticipating the launch of the iPad 3, which is rumoured to be happening next wednesday. Invitations to journalists said: “We have something you really have to see. And touch.” Oooo-Eer!
Continuing with the fruity technology theme, from apples to… Raspberrys. The world’s cheapest computer has been launched at only £22. The Raspberry pi (pi, not pie) has been designed to get kids coding.
Windows has launched a public preview of Windows 8; it looks much like its smartphone equivalent and is clearly designed the tablet computing in mind.
Facebook launched Timeline for brands; Coca-cola, Ben & Jerry’s,Manchester United and Coldplay are amongst the early adopters. Readwriteweb have complied this article of company reactions to the changes.
Mashable has scoured the internet for the top 15 “sh*t people say” videos, saving you time, and exasperated sighs.
Google’s privacy policy is changing, read about it here on the BFD blog.
And finally, security at the Bigfoot Digital blog was compromised this week. We can confirm that it has been taken over. Sources say that her name is Laura, she loves all things social media, and dreams of owning a pug named Willoughby.
