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E-Marketing Performance Blog

Aren’t Dogpiles Supposed to Stink?

Back in the dark ages, long before Google entered the search market (and I used AOL shhhh, don’t tell), I found Dogpile.com and it instantly became my favorite engine. When Google entered the scene, I was horribly reluctant to leave my old friend Dogpile and the mascot Arfie. When teaching computer training classes to newbies, one of my favorite parts of teaching the “Introduction to the Internet” was introducing everyone to the meta search results that Dogpile returned.

As I said, I was reluctant to move on, but working in the IT industry it was pretty much mandatory, and I did eventually make the move. After some initial adjustment, I never went back. That is until recently. On Wednesday the AdWords Addict posted AdWords on Dogpile – Can You Spot Them? and I had to go check it out.

I did a quick search for a keyword in one of my best performing campaigns (shame on me for not using the AdWords Preview Tool, but it doesn’t show me Dogpile results!) and found my ad to be listed at #4 … and the sponsored ad did indeed look pretty much like the organic search results. The difference is that the display URL is listed as Sponsored by: and at the end of the display URL it indicates which provider had the ad.

Another quick search, for another keyword, for another client, finds them in the #1 spot A little further down the page was the client’s natural listings. I initially found it curious that neither of my search results indicate the ad was found on Google, Yahoo and MSN (as some of the other ads displayed), because both of these clients perform tremendously well on all three networks. It didn’t take me a lot of thinking though, to realize that the results wouldn’t be identical because I have different ad creatives for each network.

Just for fun, I tried another keyword and found one of my Yahoo ads. In our industry, we’re going to notice things like the display URL pretty quick, but I’m quite certain that people like my mom (and maybe yours?) aren’t going to see that difference, particularly if your ad creative reads like a sales pitch and is written in sentence case rather than initial caps … This just further supports reason to write good ad copy and make sure the landing pages relevant to what the visitor is looking for! In doing so, you’re going to be able to capture more traffic from the Search Networks.

So Dogpile … I still love ya, even though I left ya. Kind of like an old boyfriend I had once …

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