Marie and Hayley (marketing Hayley) and I invented a game one Friday afternoon in the office when we were messing about.
Marie told us about something she had discovered messing about with SEO and searches online. Worth remembering that Marie has been doing the marketing for The Campbell Clinic ever since it started and, regardless of what she thinks, she knows a thing or two about marketing and pay per click and adverts.
It turns out if you type ‘Colin Campbell dentist Nottingham’ into Google (I might not be entirely correct on the wording of that search but I think I am) there are two adverts for different practices which are close to us that come up at the top of the page.
These are (obviously) pay per click (PPC) ads and if you click on them enough times they disappear because that must mean their budget has been spent for the day.
For those of you who are uninitiated in the ways of PPC you can’t just keep clicking on them from the same computer, it has to be from different IP addresses. We discovered this on PPC a while ago when we did an experimental session on it and found out that people were just hitting our PPC for fun with no intention of going on the website.
The funny thing here though is that if you type ‘dentist Nottingham’ into Google the same adverts don’t come up. So in terms of being a scientific study, the only alteration factor is the words ‘Colin Campbell’ so it does seem (although we might be wrong) that people are paying for the ‘Colin Campbell’ search who are not Colin Campbell.
Honestly, surely that cannot be the case?
Surely people who are not Colin Campbell are not paying for the search words for Nottingham dentist?
Surely the people who click on that and get to the website will realise it’s not Colin Campbell’s website? Or else maybe the population who are really in a hurry for a dental implant and can’t wait to verify what they’re reading will go to these practices instead?
When Marie first told me, I said ‘that can’t be right’ and thought it was just vanity us thinking that but we searched and tested the concept and it does genuinely seem that that is what’s happening.
It was actually the best fun we’ve had in ages… the only one who wins in this daft game is Google.
It’s not the dentist who places the ads and it’s not me and it’s certainly not the patient. It’s Google who gets the money.
We spent a few minutes searching for other PPCs for Nottingham stuff and it is genuinely quite funny the things you can find out doing exclusion tests and seeing who turns up for what search.
The problem is that Mr Google has it licked so there are about a billion different searches you can do for dental implants in Nottingham if you vary the words around and you have to buy different searches for each one.
The way PPC works, if you set a moderate budget so you don’t go bankrupt, you’ll only really get a couple of hits because of the auction system. We realised a long time ago that it was honestly a mug’s game.
So, it’s supposed to be isn’t it, that imitation is the greatest form of flattery? But it wasn’t flattery today, it was just entertainment but we learned a little bit about PPC and SEO as well. We’ll never learn enough to convince us that PPC will ever be a good way to go again.
Blog Post Number: 1863