Ask.com marketing drive- but is the engine up to scratch?
According to Webside Story (HBX) Ask Jeeves or Ask.com as its now known had below a 3% market share of UK search in 2006 (See the press releas on e-consultancy) but they’re looking to change that with a big PR and cross channel marketing campaign- but is the old search engine itself up to the test?
Google got to the top of the search market where it will be staying indefinitely by being the best search engine. Their superior results, massive index and innovative advertising program is what secured them this incredible market position- over 75% UK search coverage, 55%+ in the US. I believe this is still the case- the search results of other engines including Yahoo! and MSN simply don’t compare in terms of accuracy and depth of results.
Ask have relaunched themselves with a new brand identity and slightly reworked homepage and attempted to push traffic with a big TV and online marketing campaign which appears to be targeting what would usually be classified the ‘early adopters’ of the internet; the tech savy, semi-geeks. However I would question whether this can be an effective strategy based on the quality of their product.
The Ask.com search engine does not seem to be up to scratch in terms of results, its index is up to six months older than Google in the example of many sites I monitor and its scoring system is nowhere near as sophisticated as the top three- if one were so inclined I’m sure Ask results could still be easily manipulated.
It seems strange that with the product they have ask would attempt to target this group who are hyper-aware of digital marketing and savy enough with search technology to spot the flaws in Ask.com’s results- I’m sure soon moving back to Google or Yahoo! after a quick experiment.
It seems to me there’s a massive gap in the search market for an engine which markets directly at an older, less savy audience. The over 50′s for example are less likely to know good search results from bad and ultimately have a greater lloyalty and lifetime value than a tech-savy audience who are likely to stray at the first sign of something newer, better and cooler.
This group is also becoming increasingly valuable as online shoppers and are more likely to be looking for high value services such as financial and legal which carry a greater advertising yeild for the search engine.
Ask wold also sit well with the age group as a brand- its massively valuable domain name being far easier to remember and access than ‘Google’ or ‘Yahoo!’ which is a small but hugely relevant point for occassional surfers unlikely to be familiar with the Google toolbar and do the majority of searching by first navigating to a search engine they know- thus also creating valuable real estate on the engine’s homepage.
While its good to see other engine’s having a crack at Google they are never really going to compete with the top three. However this does not mean that Ask’s campaign is in vein. By just increasing their search share by 1% they are stealing millions and millions of pounds from Google’s pockets and with smart marketing and improvements to their product the campaign could very well be a big success.
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