Guess who registered gordonandfrank.com five days AFTER One Degree registered gordonandfrank.ca?
1 CommentCategory: Domains
This whole “Gordon and Frank” thing is offering some really interesting insights into cross-channel marketing.
Not up-to-speed on the saga? Here’s a recap:
# Superbowl Sunday – See Bell Beaver ads tagged with “frankandgordon.ca”:http://www.frankandgordon.ca/ URL, wonder if they registered “gordonandfrank.ca”:http://www.gordonandfrank.ca/. They didn’t.
# Register the domain.
# Monday February 6th – write an “article for One Degree”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/02/06/gordonandfrankca explaining why Bell probably should have bought the alternate domain and point gordonandfrank.ca at it.
# Read “the Marketing Magazine article”:http://www.marketingmag.ca/magazine/current/the_work/article.jsp?content=20060206_74079_74079 _(sub. req.d)_ and realize this is a *huge* campaign that will go well beyond the Olympics.
# Wait for someone at “Bell”:http://www.bell.ca or “Cossette”:http://www.cossette.com to notice.
So, after one week, where were we:
* 6,618 pages served.
* 1,225 people clicked through to the real Bell site.
* 745 people got here by searching with words like Bell, Beavers, Frank, Gordon.
* “Bell Beavers” is the most common search term that gets people here.
* 34 people got here because of Norm MacDonald. A lot of them are angry.
* Then again, some people love the beavers so much they’re looking to buy Frank and Gordon plushies.
* The National Post’s Mark Evans “talks to”:http://evans.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/2/14/1761227.html “Frank and Gordon”.
* Still no word from Bell or Cossette.
Things we can learn from this exercise:
Do you type the www. whenever you want to visit a site? No? Well, you are not alone.
Just as we learned that we didn’t need to say “http://” when promoting a domain, many marketers are now dropping the www as well.
And since most sites are set up to redirect users to the web site even without the www, people are learning they can cut out four keystrokes by skipping the “dub-dub-dub”.
But what happens if _your_ web site isn’t configured correctly?
You end up turning customers away like the TD Bank has been doing for years now.
Try going to “td.com”:http://td.com – here’s what you see:
Loads of visitors will look at this message and assume that their site is down (or has been hacked or something).
Some might guess that TD just mis-configured their servers and try again with the www but the vast majority will assume the site is down.