Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Dragon's Den and Paid Search

Dragon's Den is one of my favourite TV programmes. I think it's genuinely intelligent and entertaining, and while you get the occasional weak candidate on, most of the ideas that they feature are pretty strong. I really love it.

Given that it is currently the top performing programme on BBC 2, with 3.74m viewers in the week ending 10th August, why don't the companies featured use paid search?

Two cases in point.

Two weeks ago the site iFoods.tv were on. They are a video recipe channel, but their drawback, and this is why they didn't get investment, was that their company name is one letter different to the longer established iFood.tv. Yes, iFoods come up top on organic (free) search results, but why aren't they buying terms like 'video recipes'? Or iFood? No one else is buying these terms, so they would be very cheap.

In the last episode a guy was on with his invention Magic Pizza. Magic Pizza is a device you put under the middle of a pizza when you cook it, so that the middle sits higher in the oven to ensure that it's cooked right through. He got the investment - but the day after the programme was on you had to search in vain to find out any more about. All you got were links to people discussing his product on forums. So why not spend a few quid on the term 'Magic Pizza'? & why don't companies featured buy the term 'Dragon's Den'?

2 comments:

Nick Burcher said...

After Diamondgeezer.com was on Dragon's Den their website traffic went up massively and the site crashed under the weight of extra traffic. Between the first showing and the re-run the following Sunday Paid Search activity on 'diamond geezer' then increased enormously.

I wrote about this episode of Dragon's Den here - Dragon's Den drives web traffic

But agree that more companies should be using paidd search around their appearances - missed opportunity!

Dan said...

Good point Nick - I'd forgotten about the DiamondGeezer bloke.

Doing a bit more digging I've found that iFoods.tv also wrote about their post show traffic increase here:
http://www.ifoods.tv/blog/?p=283

"The following stats cover a 24 hour period from the moment the Dragons’ Den was aired……

55,563 Unique Visitors
186,819 Page Views
3.37 Page views per visit
40.97% Bounce rate

88.26% Percentage of new visits

We saw a massive amount of hits as the show aired and there is a good chance that the figures would have been substantially higher but our website suffered a mini heart attack due to the sheer volume the machines had to deal with. We outsource our video hosting to Amazon and this is a huge help in keeping things up to speed in the last few days!"

So clearly Dragon's Den does have a marked effect on traffic, but with paid search they could do even better.

I'd be interested to know what impact the appearance had on iFood.tv - the commenter on iFood.tv's YouTube channel clearly got the two mixed up:

http://www.youtube.com/user/ifoodtv

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