Article
Online local search campaigns boost traditional marketing
Google is one search engine working with QSRs to craft targeted marketing with impressive test results.
August 23, 2009
When McDonald's launched its specialty coffees earlier this year, its banner ads inviting consumers to McCafé Your Day were all over the Web.
But it wasn't that long ago that the top quick-serve chains saw little value in advertising online, particularly with local or targeted search campaigns, said Sam Sebastian, director of local and business-to-business markets for Google. The chains didn't believe that their customers were searching online for their products or making decisions about those menu items.
Google's local advertising team has spent the last three years or so showing them otherwise, providing data that details just how active diners — including QSR customers — are in making decisions online.
For instance, Google research has found that 90 percent of diners go online for information about restaurants, a 32 percent increase over last year, Sebastian said.
How diners search for restaurants |
*Source: Google |
"We've (shown QSRs the data), convincing them that consumers are online and they're using search and video and other mechanisms to form their opinions — and that there's a place for marketing in the medium," he said.
Driving local sales
Google's goal for QSRs is to drive a brand's national marketing message down to the local stores via online search and display advertising. Adding a local element to a national campaign can allow franchisees or local store operators to complement the chain's broadcast ads with messaging for their own market. For example, a search for burgers in Kansas City might direct consumers to a display ad for a local store opening or specials offered only in that market.
Search advertising can take several forms, but the primary goal is for customers to take some type of action, whether downloading a coupon, buying a gift card or with pizza, online ordering. A brand's local search campaign might feature a sponsored link on the search results page that directs consumers to a landing page. The sponsored link could appear to consumers searching from a PC in a particular zip code or for a certain word or phrase in a particular city.
For example, a search for "fast food San Diego" results in a sponsored link to "'Trim It' Carl's Jr." Searching from a PC in Louisville, Ky., a similar ads appears for sister chain Hardee's, which is located in the Midwest and South.
Visitors click on the ad and are directed to a landing page that also appears on the brands' Web sites. (But to get there from the Carl's Jr. site, visitors need to click on the home page, then click on Menu & Nutrition and then Options.) On the landing page, consumers can find information about the chain's low-carb, veggie, gluten-free and low-fat menu options. When consumers click to download the coupon, Carl's Jr. pays for the click.
"Capitalizing on the impact local search can have on a business, QSRs can connect with consumers at the moment of relevance, when they're looking for a location, menu or review, and drive incremental business — all online," Sebastian said.
Megan Talbott, director of insight and strategy for direct marketing agency hawkeye, said research has shown that using landing pages in local search campaigns is surprisingly effective than directing consumers to the brand's Web site.
"Overall, if you look at total performance of search click through, it is true that when you serve off a targeted custom landing page for that search result, if the action, then, is a downloadable coupon, more of the coupons would be downloaded from the targeted landing page than if you just dropped (online visitors) onto your Web site," she said.
Talbott cautions, though, that the landing page must be well planned and designed in order to achieve those results.
"The trick is the advertiser needs to make sure those landing pages answer that search call," she said. "It's not good to do a lot of landing pages that are very generic. It's much better if they are very specific to what your search terms were because you are serving up something that's meaningful to the customer."
Online works with broacast campaign
As effective as online local advertising can be for QSRs, the campaigns work best for brands when they complement a national broadcast campaign and use the same messaging. That way, QSRs can expand their broadcast reach and create engagement. Google research has found that consumers often go online after hearing a TV or radio campaign, searching for the key words in the ad.
"We're not advocating that online take over television, by any means," Sebastian said. "It's just a very nice complement to what folks are doing with their ad budgets."
Adding an online component to a campaign is relatively inexpensive compared to broadcast media, Sebastian said. Companies bid on the search term that will result in their sponsored link on Google.com through an auction system, and pay once their ads are clicked. Companies also can purchase display advertising that appears on site partners in the Google Content Network.
Sebastian said the return on investment is more apparent than a broadcast campaign because the message can be targeted or localized. As brands test their online campaigns, they can even be quickly modified based on immediate online impressions data.
Sebastian said that although QSR can use the conversion rate of online coupons to determine a campaign's ROI, the local sales results tend to speak for themselves.
"The better test is to really flood a market with online advertising and then compare that to the sales uplift they're seeing in that particular market and compare it to maybe what they've done in the past when they've only run print or TV or something and then determine what the impact is," he said.
Future for online advertising An online campaign offers QSRs the ability to target and to be flexible, qualities unavailable in "any other medium," Sebastian said. "So we think we've got a good balance of both reach and precision because with the tools and the targeting technology you can really hone in on particular areas." Sebastian said online advertising has huge growth potential as brands, marketers and consumers take on new technology. For example, using local search advertising to drive online ordering has potential for QSRs once the companies develop their operational systems to accommodate it as pizza brands have done.
Another area for advertising growth is mobile marketing. Sebastian said mobile search has even more potential to result in a consumer's offline response because smartphone users are already on the go and ready to make a decision.
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Another big opportunity likely to come before online ordering or mobile marketing is video advertising, especially on Google partner site YouTube. The challenge, however, is finding the method that reaches the social community on the online video channel.
"When we figure out the magic sauce of how to have advertising that connects with that community and it actually works, that's a huge opportunity as well," he said.
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