On Monday I spoke on the Multichannel Metrics panel at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose. My presentation focused on how companies can use search intelligence to monitor and to some extent control the effects of offline advertising, direct mail and public relations, as well as monitor the effects of consumer generated media. One of the case studies I presented was on how Ford Motor Company could use search intelligence during an event such as last week’s recall of 1.2 million vehicles. It turns out that in September of 2005 Ford issued a recall of 3.8 million vehicles for the same issue – a faulty cruise control switch that could result in engine fires. You can see from the search term chart below for ‘ford recall’ that this recall may have received more press attention, given that search volume is higher.

I presented search data from last year’s recall that could be used to make the case that Ford should be bidding on sponsored listings, assuming that there are no legal reasons that would prevent the company from doing so. Two points led me to this conclusion:
Firstly, according to a Pew study released last year, only 38% of Internet users are aware of the difference between sponsored and organic listings. Thus, even though the Ford page with information on the recall is the first organic result on both Google and Yahoo, in the eyes of users, legal sites like www.YourLemonLawRights.com are the first results. Search term analysis proves the point that users are easily distracted during this type of query: while I don’t know for sure if the Ford site was the first organic result last September, search term analysis in that time period shows that Ford received only 34% of traffic from the term ‘ford recall,’ while Ford sites received 77% of the traffic from the term ‘ford.’ You can see from the table below that legal sites and news sites also received a significant portion of the traffic from searches for ‘ford recall.’

While I’m not going to claim knowledge of how the auto industry handles recalls, it seems to me the most important message a company should convey in PR crisis to prevent people from filing lawsuits is informing them of what to do in case they own of the recalled models, and how the situation will be resolved. The Ford page states that vehicle owners will be notified if they have a vehicle that should be recalled, or that they can take it to a dealer to have the part replaced. In addition, Ford’s website allows vehicle owners to enter in their VIN (Vehicle Identification Number) to see if their vehicle will be recalled. Ford could include some of this information in a sponsored listing and thus siphoning off some of the searchers who may have been tempted to go to one of the legal sites.
The second point that makes the case for sponsored listings in a PR crisis is that searchers use a myriad of terms to find what they are looking for, and the site may not optimized for these terms. The search term suggestion report below shows that the phrase ‘ford recall’ made up only 33% of the search volume of 148 terms containing ‘ford’ and ‘recall.’ Consumers search by model number, model type, and even year (farther down on the list), and the Ford site does not show up in many of those results. The ‘Success Rate’ metric shows that users are less likely to find useful results of some of those searches. For example, only 84.62% of searches for ‘ford f150 recall’ ending up leaving the SERP last September, meaning that 15% performed another search because they didn’t see what they were looking for.

If there are no legal limitations, Ford could easily run a broad match campaign on ‘ford recall’ to ensure that the correct information is available to potential owners of the recalled vehicles, as well as prevent potential lawsuits.