British Airways – work for free – fail at PPC

As you all know my team and I manage Search  and as a result of this we have to keep track of what people are doing online. You will no doubt have heard about the recent British Airways disputes over pay freezes, job losses, staff cuts and the rest of it either in the news or here on the inter-webs, we have been keeping a close eye on the developments too and genuinely feel for what their staff must be going through right now.

In an industry (an industry I am incredibly new to) where I have found staff to be intensley loyal to their employer, and really care about the service offered and how well customers are taken care of it must be unfathomably frustrating to be asked to make such extreme personal sacrifices such as taking three months paid leave, or freezing your salary for up to three years while still ensuring that you are doing your all to maintain genuine pride in your work and making sure your customers are taken care of as well as they always have been.

It is because of these reasons that I decided to write this post.

last week British Airways began offering summer sale prices on their website to generate as much revenue as possible during what is sure to be a couple of hard months for them.

 I set about checking up on the British Airways offer and found something quite startling.

Try this search on Google (don’t be scared of the phantom mouse):

“BA summer sale”

Now click on the sponsored link at the top (the British Airways one)

As you will now no doubt be aware of, British Airways are sending traffic through to an expired landing page, and have been doing so since the start of their sale.

In a genuine effort to save them money and improve their campaign I tweeted about this at www.twitter.com/callumadamson the day after I discovered it (British Airways follow me on Twitter) and gave them a day to realise their mistake and correct it. Well folks it has been three days since then and they still haven’t fixed it.

I can’t realisticly predict how much money they have spent on traffic to send customers to an expired landing page, but what I can say for sure is that if you are asking your staff to work for free, freeze their pay, or any other measure that will help them bring the company back into profitability, the least you can do is ensure that every penny spent is going towards revenue generation.

What can we learn from this?

When you launch a new PPC campaign check it by hand on live search engines – don’t trust the Google ad-preview tool, sure it will be laborious and slightly boring, but you’ll reap the rewards, and if it is a short run campaign (our summer offers end on the 14th July) then it is doubly important to ensure that your campaign is running at full speed from day 1.

I’m not saying that all of our campaigns are 100% unbelievably the most amazing bestest campaigns ever run (we still have a lot of work to do to get there) but we’re careful with our spends and targeting because we know that in this industry every penny counts at the moment, and we’re doing our best.

Love,

Callum

*Caveat

This post is an entirely personal viewpoint and in to way constitues the views, opinions or thoughts of my employer or anyone connected with me. It is merely an observation and is in no way slanderous in it’s intent.

When you can’t be found on Google

I recently dropped my Blackberry bold while rushing to a departure gate in Gatwick airport (I left my ipod at home and had to go back for it) which resulted in the rear casing becoming permentantly loose and falling off randomly while using the phone.

SEE:

So I called O2 (read un-human corporation)  to see if there was anything they could do for me.  As expected, even though I have been a loyal O2 customer for 8 years there was nothing they could do for me, except sell me a new phone at around £450 (awesome).

Now I’m not the kind of person that let’s things like this get in my way so I started looking online for a company that a friend introduced me to a little while back. They make very cool custom replacement parts for Blackerry, iphone, PSP etc.  And seeing as how I needed a new back plate for my broken bold I thought that I’d slplash out on something a bit flash. The company I am talking about is called Colorware, but I didn’t know that when I started my search as it had been months since I checked out their site, so I began with quite a straight forward query:

http://tinyurl.com/lxyeoe  – Clicking this will run the same Google query I ran “custom blackberry housing”.  Now I can accept that Colorware might not be very “up” on SEO, so I tried again, and again and couldn’t get the Colorware recommendation from any site within the SERP.

This was the beginning of my frustration, so taking stock, I tried to think about where I’d first seen a post on Colorware and jumped areound a few tech sites that I read regularly like Gizmodo etc.  entering Blackberry query strings into their search boxes, scrounging round old forum posts and still found nothing.

Did I give up?…. of course not ;o)

I changed my search tactics. I knew that they also customised iphone covers and thought that because the iphone and anything to do with it is juicy link bait, I would be sure to find something using the same query strings replacing the work “blackberry” with the word “iphone”, so I began my search:

http://tinyurl.com/l3vbnh- this is the first query replicated using the word iphone instead of blackberry.

Nothing…….. So I tried a second query:

http://tinyurl.com/njxs8s – BAM ! – This  gave me the result I was looking for.

So what does this teach me?

If you have a great site and a great product, then please, market it:

• Run a PPC campaign, several if you’re a geek like me.
• Find out who is linking to you and ask for relevant anchor text.
• Protect your brand early online:  www.colourware.co.uk takes me to a completely unassociated site.

Follow those rules and I’ll be back for more, don’t follow them, and someone less stubborn than me will quite possibly never know who you are trying to appeal to as a company, or what product you are trying to sell>

Know how I am going to search for your product and put yourself in my path, optimize simply and often and you’ll definitely get results.

Love,

Callum

Google gave me a lava lamp

I have been managing search at bmi now since February (time flies when you’re having fun) and have had a fantastic time so far, I love working in the most competitive search sector (travel) and I love working with our fantastic emarketing team.

Previously I worked agency side for many different clients, actually, I should explain what I mean by that.

Agency side: This is when you work for a digital agency for many clients, you are employed by your agency (e.g. Reading Room – an agency that some of my friends work for) to manage PPC, SEO, or technical projects on behalf of clients (companies that like having agency expertise to maximise their online strategy).

Client side: This is when you work for a company (like me) as part of their online marketing team and only work on your employers online strategy.

So..

While I was working agency side I go to know many clients, lots of industry professionals and lots of sales managers at search engines and social media sites, all of whom were a pleasure to get to know might I add.

Sales managers are the lovely people who help you maximise ad spend/ROI and strategy and also encourage you to spend more money on advertising using the products they represent e.g. Google Adwords. Every sales manager I have met has been great and have definitely been valuable assets to both myself and clients I used to work with.

But.. none of them ever gave me a lamp, until now that is.

In the very recent past I was taken to be introduced to the travel sector team at Google by my boss here at bmi. During our meeting she mentioned that in her five years of working with the travel team at Google she has never had a chance to get her hands on any of that lovely Google branded merchandise, and that she has always wanted a Google lava lamp (personally I’d prefer a peek at their algorithm) to have a constant reminder of her favourite search engine.

The meeting ended and we all went back to work trying to figure out the mysteries of online travel, weeks past as they tend to do and it was time again for us to pop over to the Google offices to catch up on developments and drink some of their wonderful Google coffee (organic of course). We walked into the meeting room and were presented with two lovely Google lava lamps, one blue, one green. After getting back to the bmi offices and being told, “Callum I better not see that on ebay”, we chose our favourite colours and plugged them in.

As you can see from the picture on the right, it’s a lovely addition to my desk and a constant reminder of just how thoughtful Google are.

Thank you Google.

Love,

Callum