Contextual advertising - nineMSN v Fairfax
I have spent a bit of time this evening catching up on some reading whilst watching the Bulldogs play the Cowboys in the NRL. My idle surfing led me to Australia’s best sporting Blog — The Serve. Today’s rugby league news has been full of the Andrew Johns drug controversy, and whilst reading an article about his brother Matthew’s reaction, I noticed a couple of contextual ads by Google leading to nineMSN and the Sydney Morning Herald websites.
Clicking on the links gives a great insight on what PPC advertisers should and should not do.
The ninemsn headline and ad copy reads:
Johns Caught with Ecstasy
Joey Johns Caught with Ecstasy
Read the full story online now.
news.ninemsn.com.au
The ad is very much on topic and when I click through to the website there is a great section with all the latest news, video, photos, articles and user comments all related to the Andrew Johns story. Exactly what I was looking for! The advertising was related to what I had been reading, the advertising copy set an expectation of more news about this topic, and the landing page delivered the extra news that I was seeking.
Then on the other hand we have the Sydney Morning Herald:
Rugby League News
SMH gets a fresh new look. Read
the latest sports news & you could win.
SMH.com.au
Clicking on the ad leads me to a page with a very attractive young lady telling me that if I bookmarked the SMH homepage I could win an Apple MacBook pro. This is totally so far off the mark is not funny. Fairfax want me to hand over personal details without even giving me a taste of their journalism. Surely their online marketing brains must know something about building trust!
If I were going to bookmarke either website it definitely wouldn’t be this one. My reaction when landing on this page was to hit the back button, shake my head, and write a Blog post outlining what not to do …..
September 27th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Excellent observation on Google Ads.
Can’t count the number of times the organic results didn’t show what I was looking for, and the ad copy did, but once I got to the page, my reaction was, “huh”?
To be fair to the SMH ad, it does deliver what it says, “you could win”. But yes, you’d expect the link to go to their sports/league page and not a competition page where it’s another click to get to where you want to be.