Ask.com NASCAR Campaign ROI

By Mike Walker (@mizike24)

GSI Search Specialist

Being a big fan of NASCAR and also enjoying my career in SEO I found the partnership formed by Ask.com and NASCAR to be intriguing. In January when the advertising campaign was launched I was curious how this would improve Ask.com’s share of search, as NASCAR fans are known to have some serious brand loyalty to sponsors. I am living proof of this.

Ask.com has spent upwards of $10 million dollars with NASCAR and the Hall of Fame Racing team which fields the number 96 Ford Fusion driven by 2000 NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion Bobby Labonte. This is pretty much the majority of their marketing budget. Revenue has also gone towards television advertising during NASCAR broadcasts on Fox, TNT and ESPN. Whether it has been television commercials or crawl ads featuring the Ask.com search box with a NASCAR related question emblazoned on the TV screen during the broadcasts on Fox, the never-say-die search engine has used clever ways and funny commercials to engage the loyal stock car fans to use their search engine. They even have a presence at the tracks to engage fans face-to-face. All of this has seemed to work to keep Ask.com going.

I recently read an interesting blog post on Econsultancy.com by Meghan Keane on Ask.com’s successful return on investment in the first six months of their $10 million dollar plus multi-media advertising campaign with NASCAR. I won’t get into all the details as her post speaks for itself, but from January to June, they have seen an increase from 1.9% in share of search to 2.2%, an overall increase of 22%. Now Ask.com president Scott Garell has made it no secret he wants to compete with the likes of Google, and though it may be an unrealistic goal the company he helps run is tapping into a niche that other search engines have historically not.

Ask.com floats around #4 to #6 in the search engine race, and will probably continue to do so. Google still dominates, with Bing and Yahoo! demanding a much larger share than Ask.com. Though Ask.com may not dominate the search landscape in the United States any time soon, they have given themselves a solid foundation to prosper with the brand loyal world of NASCAR fans.

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Tags: Ask.com, Bing, brand, Google, marketing, multi-media, NASCAR, ROI, Scott Garell, Search Engine, share of search

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Cross Platform Marketing, Searh Engine News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.