March 17, 2007

Victoria's Secret, Free Shipping, and Google

I am Kevin Hillstrom, host of The MineThatData Blog. I average 135 daily visitors, and have about 300 RSS subscribers. That yields about 158,000 visits a year. In the history of my blog, I only recall writing about Victoria's Secret once.

Victoria's Secret
is a gigantic multichannel mega-brand that runs free shipping promotions from time to time.

So when a customer uses Google to search for "Victoria's Secret Free Shipping", why doesn't Victoria's Secret appear in the top ten results, but The MineThatData Blog appears in the top five?

Does the customer who conducted this search want to know about the actual free shipping promotion, or my opinion about a free shipping promotion?

Multichannel CEOs and CMOs: Stop arguing about the USPS and proposed postage increases. Start challenging Google to provide relevant search results. Is Google your friend? Is Google actually a competitor of yours, one that is blocking traffic that should be going to your site? Or does Google make a lot of innocent mistakes, like the rest of us? I'd put my money on the latter --- I would also challenge you to start challenging Google the way you challenge the rest of your trusted vendors, folks you've worked with for decades.


UPDATE 2007.03.18: Here's a couple of searches that produce similar results:

Nordstrom Marketing

Neiman Marcus Blog

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:23 PM

    nice post keep it up!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, pretty bizarre. The same thing happened here right now. I was curious to see whether anyone had picked up a post I wrote for another blog, and I came up with two of your posts, and of course, you aren't mentioning the "Hansel and Gretel" article.

    To top it off, I have to mention that blog here in the post because Blogger/Google won't let me link to a non-Blogger post anymore.

    Ah well, at least I found a good new blog!

    ReplyDelete

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