LAST week, as a warning sounded of possible hailstorms in Johannesburg, Google South Africa staff noticed a peculiar trend.
As the number of local web searches for terms such as “hail”, “hail storm” and “hail damage” rose quickly, the number of advertisements from South African insurers and businesses related to hail and hail damage did not change at all.
Julie Taylor, head of communications for sub-Saharan Africa at Google, said: “While all the leading insurers list ‘hail damage’ as a top concern for the coming month, there are no, or extremely few, companies advertising against the search terms ‘hail’, ‘hail damage’ and ‘hail storms’.
“Insurers and other businesses need to make the connection between offline events (such as big hail storms in Johannesburg) and online searches for products and services that they offer, like insurance to cover your car damage when it happens,” she said.
Google’s AdWords system has been able to separate itself from the pack (and contribute more than $42bn in ad revenue last year) through its innovative ties to the web search function for which the company is better known.
Businesses can bid through an online auction system to have their ads appear next to certain sets of search results. The price to have an ad placed against the results for a specific search term varies depending on the frequency of searches for that term. Companies only pay the price once someone clicks on their ads.
“Our goal is to help advertisers reach people who need what they’re offering,” said Luke Mckend, Google South Africa country director. “This system gives businesses the ability to react quickly to significant events and respond to users needs faster than traditional media.”
Yet many businesses in South Africa are still figuring out how best to use the AdWords system and, more importantly, how to exploit real-world situations to their commercial advantage.
Carl Louw, executive head of marketing at Johannesburg-based short-term insurer Telesure, only started advertising his company against hail-related terms last week once he realised the prices were low even though the search frequency was high.
Businesses accustomed to placing day-to-day print newspaper ads are also still catching up to the speed of the Google AdWords system, which lets them respond to changing search trends within minutes.
When asked about why so few insurance companies are bidding against search terms related to hail, Gideon Galloway, CEO of King Price Insurance, said: “The price is so cheap, yet no one is bidding on them at the moment. Thus, it must be pure oversight; you can’t cover them all.”
The infinite range of possible search terms can indeed make it difficult for companies to pinpoint where their ads will be most effective.
Mr Mckend said people generally used two different strategies. “With the ‘always on’ method, services with unchanging related words keep their ads relatively constant in terms of searches they post ads against.
“And then there are the tactical campaigns, which track things like seasons and tourist patterns to try to capture moments in time — like a flower shop on Valentine’s Day.”
Businesses also try to jump on the bandwagon of fads that may not directly relate to their products. Ms Taylor spoke of an instance where pop band Just Jinjer’s lead singer, Ard Matthews, sang the national anthem and forgot the lyrics. Searches for YouTube clips of the performance spiked, which prompted First National Bank to post ads against the singer’s name.
With so much information available about the way people search, Google is learning how populations respond to events and using this data to help businesses get their messages out to specific audiences.
“Advertisers can’t afford to treat every country and every city the same any more, because of the cultural differences in online search patterns,” Mr Mckend said. “Search terms, in aggregate, represent the cultural zeitgeist — what the country as a whole is thinking at that moment.”