The Meerkat Bidding War

Most search pundits would probably assess the commercial value of the keyword 'meerkat' as negligible and until recently that would certainly have been true. But it's been interesting to watch the effects of comparethemarket.com's new TV campaign on Google.

The creative agency is VCCP so I'm not the most unbiased of commentators when I say it's a brilliant example of a creative solution to direct response challenge, delivering cut through in a market where consumers care very little about the vehicle which provides their 'cheap car insurance quote'. Any company which establishes stronger brand recognition will see a significant impact on both the brand and generic elements of their PPC campaign and the side effect is that suddenly the keyword 'meerkat' has become competitive!

As I have posted before, competitor bidding strategies are nowhere near as common place as many people predicted when the news about Google's trademark policy change was released and those that do exist usually fall down on some basic elements of best practice. Confused.com have put together some good creative ad copy in their attempt to take some of the halo effect from the meerkat campaign and it's a shame that this creativity was not carried through to the landing page, the usual point of failure in most competitor bidding strategies. To be worth doing at all, competitor bidding strategies must be well thought through with a creative angle or strong proposition, and as with all PPC activity the relevancy to the targeted keywords must be carried all the way through the process to the landing page.

This campaign is also another good example of the relationship between TV and search, demonstrating that the volume of brand searches on Google is one of the most relevant brand metrics to consider.

Paul Mead

MD, VCCP Search