When an advert isn’t. Or is it?

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October 18, 2007· Filed Under Blogging  Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

During one of my English language classes today we started discussing one of the projects that my students had worked on as part of their marketing master. This project happened to involve creating a marketing and communications plan for a holiday resort (tourist village/villaggio turistico) in Italy. During our discussion I mentioned Booking.com, one of the foremost on-line hotel booking sites in the world. In an attempt to justify stating that all hotels should be listed on Booking.com, I typed ‘hotels, Italy’ into Google and, lo and behold, the first sponsored ad was for Booking.com. However, one of my students noticed that Booking.com did not appear in the normal search results. Effectively she intimated that she would be more likely to click on a normal search result, than on one of the sponsored keyword generated ads. Indeed, had Booking.com appeared at the top of the normal results she would have visited the site most probably.

Very interesting I thought, how ‘normal’ Google’ results were not perceived by this person as being adverts, even though, in my opinion, they function in much the same way. I wonder how many others think in the same way, and do not perceive search engine results as being advertising. Quite a few, I imagine, and this may indicate that SEO is potentially more effective than keyword advertising.

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5 Responses to “When an advert isn’t. Or is it?”

  1. jan said on October 18th, 2007 10:09 pm

    yeah i feel the same way.although that’s basically a less overt way of advertising, is it not?

    anyway - regarding my last comment - your website still takes me at leas 6-8 min. to load ! that’s so strange - and it’s only this website that’s slow. hmm.

  2. Alex said on October 18th, 2007 10:41 pm

    Hi Jan,

    You are right - it is really a less overt form of advertising.

    And thanks for the info re the slow loading of the site - I’ve noticed that sometimes it loads up quickly, whereas other times, you have to wait for ages. I’ll look into this - it seems that the right hand side bar seems to take ages.

    Could be all the java script stuff…

    Regards,

    Alex

  3. admin said on October 18th, 2007 10:46 pm

    Jan,

    Ok, I’ve removed the Sonific songspot media player thingy from the rh side bar. Can you let me know if that has made any difference?

    If not, I’ll reduce the number of Google ads in the hope that that will speed things up a bit.

    Thanks for the info - greatly appreciated.

    Alex

  4. Andy said on October 19th, 2007 8:46 am

    It’s true for me. I have this automatic response that I avoid the ones that don’t appear in the regular listings, strangely, even if the ’sponsored’ result goes to the same page as the first in the normal ranking!

    I know, that really doesn’t make sense but I find that I almost ignore sponsored links entirely.

    But your comment about SEO is not entirely correct and, sometimes, my blog appears high on a list for a search that doesn’t really reflect the content at all. SEO is a very strange beast.

  5. Alex said on October 19th, 2007 10:09 am

    Hi Andy,

    Interesting, so you are someone else who avoids the ads. I thought there might be more than one person who does this. Although, I will click on the sponsored ads if they relate to what I am after.

    As for SEO, I think you are right in saying that I’m not entirely correct, SEO is indeed an odd beast, and it is not all that clear how it works. What I do know is that Wordpress.com was pretty SEO friendly - well at least the Wordpress.com version of this blog managed to get on the first page of searches for ‘blog, Italy’, which I thought was good.

    Have a good weekend,

    Alex

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