Anti-HP Customer Service AdWords Campaign

    Posted: April 3rd, 2008 | Author: MO | Filed under: Uncategorized |

    In the past month at work I’ve been fighting with a co-worker: My work Laptop. From the time I hit the power button until Vista loads would take 2+ hours. Now as a GTD wannabe I clearly was wasting a good sum of my day fighting with the very tool that allows me to make a living. As I’m no stranger to broken hardware I followed proper protocol and restarted my computer, reseated the battery, reseated the memory (of course with the battery out)… Until I hit the wall and started to look for a HP tech support hotline for my HP laptop.

    While I have all the printed documentation stuffed in a desk drawer like most people I used a another computer and did a Google search for “HP Customer Service”. The resulting page had a paid text ad the caught my attention:
    HP Customer Support

    Curious I clicked. The resulting landing page took my frustration away in an instant:

    HP Customer Service is the Worst

    HA, I was not alone. Clearly HP Customer Service had irked the wrong person. Amazingly now that it’s been a month since I first spotted this Adtext it is still in rotation. I was sure this would get pulled as they are using “HP” directly in the Adtext, which is slightly* taboo. Clearly someone is asleep at the helm at HP marketing, public relations, and customer support for this ad is still running. If HP took 10 minutes and placed a trademark violation report with the Google Adwords team they would not have this public relations issue.

    What I would do If I was at HP:

  • Fill out a Google Adwords Trademark violation form
  • Contact the individual who put up this paid campaign. Get his/her feedback of what happen to them and learn from the honest feedback. The person had the gusto to put up a paid search campaign to bash HP, the likely know your service department better than you.
  • Start your own Customer Support paid search campaign. Bid on terms like HP Pavilion Dv6000 support, HP Laptop help, HP tech support… While electronics keywords are highly competitive if your campaign uses qualifying keywords that are then phrase and/or exact matched you will “likely” pay a lower CPC. See Apples customer support model for supporting evidence of this theory, they do a great job supporting the customer throughout the lifetime of an apple product using a paid search campaign.

    • Will I ever by an HP Laptop again? I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m happy with a trusty (please don’t blow up) Dell at the moment.

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