Optimising for misspelt keywords is an age old tactic that has proven to be highly effective. It’s cheaper to optimise or bid (Google AdWords) for keywords that are misspelt as they’ll be considerably less expensive as there will be less interest in them. This tactic has flowed over into the purchasing of misspelt domain names (aka doppelgänger domains) as well.
Sidenote: There’s a really great story from a few years ago where two security experts intercepted around 120,000 individual email addresses from 30 Fortune 500 companies. Read it here if you’re interested.
Snickers have taken advantage of this and rolled out a really super campaign in the UK, called “You are Not You When You’re Hungry”, that targets misspelt keywords. The agency that assisted Snickers obtained 500 search terms and used an algorithm to run through common misspellings of these words and produced a list of 25,381 different misspellings.
Guess what the outcome was? In just 48 hours, the Snickers campaign received 558,589 impressions. Here’s an example from SEW:
Interesting, Snickers have revealed several of the misspellings that they used: “wether”, “gool”, “ness”, “amazon”, “definately”, “wierd”, “vacum”, “moonsoon”, “publically” and “facw”.
I suppose the interesting thing to note here is that they weren’t targeting the misspellings of keywords associated with their brand, but rather capitalising on keywords across the board.
The agency behind it, AMV BBDO released a fantastic video:
Note: Targeting misspelt keywords in a Google AdWords campaign is against Google’s Terms of Service, so Snickers had to work with Google to get approval on this campaign.
