Minecraft and Microsoft Use PPC (on Google) To Maximize Press Exposure

If you are following tech news today, you will see the official announcement that Microsoft Bought Minecraft. The story is semi interesting, but what stood out for me was when I googled Minecraft this ad came up.

minecraft

I don’t know how long this ad has been live, but It is more than just a new headline and ad text. The ad links to the XBox page about Minecraft joining Microsoft.

I guess this makes sense. If you know your going to get some press coverage, you want to make sure to capture that interest…because you can be sure there will be a huge spike in searches around the news story.

What’s interesting is that this ad headline exactly matches the headline of the landing page for a perfect message match…and likely helps with Quality Score. (I never tested it scientifically, but there is certainly evidence that having your ad copy in your landing page text will improve landing page relevance, which is probably about 35% of the Quality Score formula.

Interestingly enough, on Bing, there are no ads on the page…it looks like a search for a brand in Bing brings up navigational and informational links.

minecraftbing

About David Melamed

David Melamed is the Founder of Tenfold Traffic, a search and content marketing agency with over $50,000,000 of paid search experience and battle tested results in content development, premium content promotion and distribution, Link Profile Analysis, Multinational/Multilingual PPC and SEO, and Direct Response Copywriting.

Comments

  1. The though of doing something like this actually never occurred to be, to be honest, but it really is a great idea. There is the possibility of it only being truly effective for major companies – in this specific example anyway – but I like the idea of adjusting your marketing avenues and such based on what you might be having going on in regards to promotion and coverage, even if you don’t focus this change in PPC. Thanks for putting an example of this up.

  2. Yeah, if you knew that some coverage and press may be coming your way, it could end up being really profitable if you take advantage of it and direct your PPC to further promote you during searches. Though I guess in a way, this move would probably only end up being really worthwhile for a company that was quite well known and not so much for ones that are kind of under the radar. But at the same time it would also depend exactly what this coverage is that you’re getting. It’s very interesting though and maybe it would end up being one of those things that is just worth the risk of trying out.

Speak Your Mind

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.