Pay Per Click Strategies Explained a Little Fuzzy

There's an article over at ClickZ today that attempts to explain the concepts of "drafting" and "hijacking" when it comes to pay per click advertising, but that leaves a pretty fuzzy impression over what the author believes constitutes hijacking. I've written before about how easy it is for small business owners and those new to search marketing to read and article and get confused about what the author is trying to say, so I thought this would be a good one to delve a little more deeply into.

From the article:

Competitiveness in the emerging paid search landscape spawns controversial tactics such as the two practices loosely termed "hijacking" and "drafting" by some industry insiders. While some search engine marketing (SEM) firms object to the strategies, others say they're fair game.

The way I read the article, the author is trying to claim that "hijacking" is simply outbidding a company on their chosen keywords or keyword phrases. This is clearly false. After all, the entire system of pay per click advertising is built on companies outbidding each other for the keyword phrases they wish to draw traffic from.

What I think the author is actually trying to say is that "hijacking" occurs when company #1 outbids company #2 on company #2's trademarked phrases. For example, if Pepsi outbid Coca-Cola on the phrase "Diet Coke," that could be considered hijacking. On the other hand, if Pepsi outbid Coca-Cola on the phrase "diet cola" that would NOT be considered hijacking.

The article does go on to point out that Yahoo has recently enacted policy changes that no longer allow a competitor to bid on a company's trademarked phrases. Google doesn't yet have this policy, but tends to work with companies to resolve issues when competitors are bidding on trademarked phrases. This is where hijacking comes into play as far as being of interest to the industry. No one is quite sure yet how these things will work out and it will likely be a few years before the industry either works out some self-regulation or the courts take care of it for them.

The author does a much better job of describing the PPC tactic known as "drafting." The term itself is pretty self-explanatory, basically a company follows in the wake of what's working for another company. The most popular example of drafting right now is the Pontiac/Mazda PPC case. What happened here is that Pontiac launched a new line of television commercials that encouraged viewers to "Google Pontiac." Mazda, seeing the obvious bump in traffic for that phrase that was going to come, headed over and set up their own PPC campaigns so that they would also show up when searchers typed the phrase Pontiac.

Drafting also refers to the act of bidding on any keyword phrase that a competitor is targeting, again, so that the second company can follow in the wake of a successful PPC campaign. While trademarked hijacking is still a bit controversial in the industry, nearly everyone agrees that drafting is just plain smart marketing.