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Canadian Search Engine Marketing: What's the Difference, eh?
By Don Lange
Direct Marketing News
APRIL 2006 — Okay, I'll admit that I'm one of those Canadians who find self-definition easier by drawing comparisons with the United States. With that out of the way, let me tell you what happens when you type the word "timmies" in Google™ Canada. Give up? The Tim Horton's site appears above the fold, second in the organic search results!That sound you just heard was your own self saying "duh". Every one in Canada knows what a timmies is. But try using the term down south and watch for puzzled faces. Try saying "I could really go for a timmies." Or, "I'm heading over to timmies, want to come?" And watch the fun.
If you think that's a rare sample, then dig not-so-deep into your lexicon and you'll probably come up with "chesterfield", "toonie", "smarties" and "all-dressed" pizza? Let's face it, Canadians do have a language all their own and when it comes to search engine advertising, smart marketers embrace and leverage the difference.
Setting the Boundaries
First the good news. When you advertise on Google you get to specify which geographical location your ads will be served in. Your ads can be served nationally, within a province or even down to cities and radii. If you are selling products or services with geo boundaries then it's always a good strategy to pick a locale. However, you do need to be aware that the location of the ad is based on the IP address of the person doing the searching. So if your searcher happens to have an ISP with servers located in Seattle then your ads won't be served. This is getting rarer and rarer as the big Canadian ISP's all seem to have their shops close to where they are serving their customer base.As of this writing, Google is the only search engine that can specify English Canada. Yahoo!® lets you segment Quebec – but only if you are serving French language ads. It promises to segment the rest of Canada shortly. MSN® will likely offer great geo-segmentation. However, we're all still waiting for its launch.
Environmental Strategies
More and more marketers are become hyper-aware that the art of search engine marketing is predicting what people are going to be looking for. However, when you consider the dynamic of that sentence, imagine how many external factors play upon the search psyche? A person's search patterns are liable to be impacted by a wide range of noise including socio-economic background, age, and income and of course environment.Environment is a key in successful segmented search campaigns. While Canadians might share with Americans the tendency to be looking up the latest on Britney Spears, it is unlikely that many people outside of Canada would be searching for such local icons as Peter Mansbridge, Lloyd Robertson or Chantal Hebert.
So how does that impact search campaigns? It impacts them because just about any product or service that is available in Canada can be sold through unique Canadians search patterns. Let's use an example of a financial services campaign.
The traditional words that marketers use for credit card campaigns are phrases such as credit ratings, interest rates, gold card, platinum card, etc. However, if a marketer approaches a credit card campaign by defining potential motivating factors that might lead to a credit card purchase then words might focus on such life phases as going to college or university, buying a new house, saving for a holiday, etc.
Really smart marketers would then phrase those words into actual people, places or things that Canadians might be looking for. For example if you want to speak with students who are going to university for the first time then your search phrases should not only include all the names of Canadian universities but also the names of the residences in each. How do you tie that into credit card marketing? That's easy. You create landing pages that relate to the topic. A credit card company that builds a landing page specifically for search campaigns that addresses the financial concerns and responsibilities of students will get relevant hits and probably some strong conversions if there is a compelling call to action.
Canadian Search Marketing
"They understand our market" is a familiar refrain from marketers who are outsourcing their SEM campaigns to some of the larger specialty firms. And no wonder. Let's face it, very much like the list business; doing work for Canadian companies takes a lot of work for relatively little revenue compared to the US marketplace. However, understanding an advertiser's business needs is not enough. A good campaign must extend to understand the mindset of the people who are searching.Another good example is the tendency of Canadian marketers to focus solely on Google because it can segment out Canada. Well, guess what. Not everyone (ok, most, but not everybody) in Canada uses Google. And notwithstanding the fact that Yahoo! will be catching up shortly with this feature, it is foolhardy to only test Google. Lesser known search engines such as LookSmart and Miva can provide great conversions assuming you take the time to optimize your ad to address Canadian searchers only. With this strategy, you actually want to avoid getting to the top of the sponsored results because you want to avoid impulse clicks – the so called "tire clickers". You want your ad to talk to careful searchers who scroll down with their eyes and read ad copy – hey it happens! What's the result? Less clicks and better conversions.
One on One
The art of search engine marketing combines prediction, persuasion and pertinence (this could be an all-new 3 P's for marketing!) If you want to be noticed in an ever-growing competitive landscape that really only guarantees that you can spend a lot of money, you need to use as many advantages as you can. That could mean wearing your maple leaf on your sleeve.Don Lange is the SVP of Cornerstone and the head of its new search engine marketing business unit which provides a complete end-to-end pay per click service for Canadian marketers and US marketers who sell products or services in Canada.
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