In this blog post, I would like to show you how brands can make great usage of Google Adwords, using the example the brand “Snickers”.

Snickers, the daughter brands of Mars Incorporated, launched in 2012 the campaign “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry”. Showing that people are not themselves when they are craving food.In 2013 Snickers teamed up with Google to target hungry people online. As hungry people tend to make more spelling mistakes, Snicker used Google Adwords to reach people making spelling mistakes.

When somebody made a spelling error in a Google search, the following ad would appear saying: “Yu cant spel properlie wen hungrie Grab yourslef a Snikkers”.

Their approach: Snickers obtained a list of the top 500 search terms and then used an algorithm to work out the most common 25 000 misspelled searches and bid on terms for them all. Examples are wether, gool, amazin, definitely, weird, publically and facw. As you can see from these examples, the misspellings are not snicker-related. They wanted to show the misspeller, that he/she might be tired and a snicker could help.

Success? It cost Snickers almost nothing and within three days of launch, the ad reached over 500 000 people. The CTR (Click-through rate) of 1.05% was impressive, and brought nearly 6,000 visitors to their tailored campaign website.

Conclusion: The goal of the misspelling campaign was to get the brand out their in a unique way. Looking at this goal I believe Snickers has made great usage of online google techniques to strengthen their brand.