Act on CO2 Search Campaign
Sep-2008
Following on from my comments on The Orange I am campaign the other week, I was interested to see that Act on CO2, a government initiative is using the same tactic, but rather more successfully than Orange.  A search for Act on CO2 will bring up the governments ‘act on Co2’ microsite which presumably is the intended result. Robin Good from Hitwise reports in this blog that the campaign has generated a large amount of traffic for the campaign.
I am interested why organisations are going for this tactic instead of just saying visit www.direct.gov.uk/actonco2.  I suppose that the rationale is
- Its shorter
- It is a call to action, more direct that saying visit a website
- It shows a certain connection with the message of the phrase
- Give searchers the opportunity to investiage around the target site
As government website tend to be high authority, and the phrase ‘act on CO2’ is quite specific, it is not a surprise to me that the government site comes up top. Â It is still a risky ploy. Â Although almost the whole of the search results page is taken up for Act on Co2 resutls, result number 7 is very negative to the subject of global warming. Â Persumably a relative of Sarah Palin.
“result number 7 is very negative to the subject of global warming. Persumably a relative of Sarah Palin.”
Are you still in lower school on the playground? What a silly, nasty, unintelligent comment.
Act on CO2 is an older campaign, and I remember there being a few complaints about the gov. spending money on Adwords instead of giving out a URL. I didn’t look at the time, but I took it to mean that they didn’t rank organically.
“Act on CO2” – and another Government ‘offline push/online pull’ campaign for the “Energy Saving Trust” (a radio advert which encourages a search on ‘energy saving trust’) were managed by the same agency.
Infact, the same agency that were doing the PPC for Orange at the time – although not Orange SEO at that point.
Possibly where Orange got the idea?
Interesting to see that Orange rank no.2 for “i am” now.
Google trends suggests that searches for “i am” in the UK have decreased
https://trends.google.com/trends?q=i+am&ctab=0&geo=GB&geor=all&date=2008&sort=0
There was certainly no convincing peak around the time of the campaign launch (July 2008).