Week 8 – E-Marketing
November 11, 2009 at 2:20 pm | Posted in Week 8 | Leave a commentThis week’s assignment requires researching via a search engine, several keywords and phrases which I feel are related to easyjet. I am interested in what results are returned, i.e. what competitors are shown and how many paid links are used by easyjet.
I started this week’s assignment by first of all typing the word “easyjet” into the search engine, “Google”. As shown from the screen shot below, there are about 3,320,000 pages related to easyjet in some way. However, some websites use easyjet as a tag for their own website so that the many people surfing the net for easyjets services will perhaps view their sites also. Users must be careful though as some of these websites could cause harm to their computers with viruses etc.
When searching for easyjet on the internet it is very easy to retrieve your results. Below in the Google screenshot I am showing the first two links which both direct customers to the website. When selecting either of the two links from Google, I was directed straight to easyjet.com with no hassle whatsoever. The very first link on the Google webpage (easyjet Official Site) is paid for as it is a sponsored link and each time this link is clicked, easyjet are charged a sum of money. Also to the right hand side of the screenshot below, is another sponsored link where easyjet are featured via directline-flights. When this link is selected I am able to book a flight with easyjet through this website. As shown below, easyjet require the user to select which language they prefer to view their website in. Once chosen, your computer will remember this and you will not have to select this again. Following this, customers are then able to book their flights.
I have proceeded further by typing in key words to Google which I myself would relate with easyjet for example, cheap flights. Results have shown that when typing “Cheap Flights” into Google, it at first returns companies such as cheapflights.co.uk, skyscanner.co.uk and travelsupermarket.com before showing results for actual airline companies like easyjet. Nevertheless, the first thing I noticed when searching for easyjet was that their competition, aerlingus have a sponsored link at the top of the page which is a paid link by the company so that their website is shown before all their competition. Alongside aerlingus who have paid links are cheapflights.co.uk and aircanada.com. Next in line are ryanair who are placed just before easyjet with jet2 following behind, however the links to their websites are not sponsored links, and are just results shown by Google.
Using another key phrase, “cheap UK airlines”, describes easyjet, and also provides results via Google. However, as before, easyjet are not the first airline mentioned, aerlingus are again a paid link and are positioned first. Flybe, ryanair and flybmi are all featured airlines who are mentioned before easyjet. For easyjet it is a positive point that they are mentioned, however with four other airlines being mentioned before them, means that easyjet could be losing customers to the other airlines like ryanair for the simple reason that they are mentioned first.
On discovering this previous information, I decided to use the search engine to type in the names of all easyjets well known UK and Irish competitors. My results showed that when searching for results on aerlingus, easyjet had one paid link to their website, however, when searching this website just a few minutes before hand there was no mention of easyjets paid link, which leads me to believe that some paid links are shown at random on certain websites.
I have used easyjets slogan, “Come on let’s Fly” to test if it relates to easyjet via the Google search engine. As shown below it has related straight to easyjet as its first link and many links thereafter. I have tested this and it directs users straight to http://www.easyjet.com.
Using the search engine, “Yahoo”, I have established that there are more paid links along the right hand side than what there are on Google’s search engine. This to me shows that easyjet feel, Yahoo is a search engine which the majority of people use, however I would disagree as I would have thought Google was more popular than any. As Yahoo.co.uk is a UK and Ireland based website, easyjet, being a UK based airline may use Yahoo for this particular reason. What they perhaps do not realise is that when users use google.com, it automatically transfers to google.co.uk. meaning their paid links would still be shown.
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