Baillie Gifford makes a risky bet.
It’s not every day that an ad asks people to go to Google rather than directly to the advertiser’s website.
But that’s what Baillie Gifford investment managers does in a new ad campaign. The photo above is from the campaign in The Economist.
You’ll notice the call-to-action in small print in the lower left.
“Search for Actual Investors”
If you search this on Google you will see an ad for Baillie Gifford and the company has nice search positioning, too. Search Bing for the phrase and the company has an ad, but so do its competitors.
Sending people to search engines is common in Japan, but it’s a risky move for an international campaign.
Both ActualInvestor.com and ActualInvestors.com are registered by other companies. ActualInvestor.com is only $2,495 at HugeDomains.
Would be interesting to know if this is the work/idea of a Third Party Advertising Agency or if they did this In-House.
Advertising Agencies would probably want to keep their clients “coming back to them” for continuous “Advertising Services” instead of having their clients receive Direct Type-In Traffic via their Domain Name.
Looks to me like a smart Seo move. Pay for ads for a while until his site ranks for this term. Since people searching for “actual investors” see his ad, click on it as consciously noticed his brand billy… on the previous ad in Economist. So then click on this sponsored ad. Google start to notice click throughs higher for that term and therefore organic rankings increase.
Doesn’t need the Exact match domain since already getting traffic for that term.
SEO 101 in a nutshell 🙂
Also a British thing. MoD advertises on radio in the UK every day with: search “army jobs”. And so on. Not so many people bing anyway.
Their competitors could now buy some Google Adwords for the keyword “Actual Investors” and drive their campaign traffic to their own sites. That should teach them 🙂
I see ads telling me to search for a specific thing literally every day.
This is a great Seo strategy move.
Google’s biggest annual revenue is the advertising of the Adwords and Adsense programs, the first one already abuses its principles and remains the same with its new Ads Google change.
I prefer to search directly on Google … and make my own online advertising with the collaboration of Advertising Agencies and advertising advertisers in all current systems
Happy Day. Jose.