Principal Financial Group® has rolled out a new advertising campaign and is using the domain name AmericaRebuilds.com in the ad.
“The recession has stimulated interest in business owners taking a more careful look at their long-term planning needs and how they will exit or pass along their business. As we work with business owners, we’re seeing a sharp disparity between what owners think their businesses are worth compared with the reality of the current market,” said Steve Parrish, national advanced solutions consultant for the Principal Financial Group. “Our team of experts runs the numbers so advisors give owners a range of values representing the potential worth of their businesses based on five financial methodologies. This opens the door to discuss future planning and funding strategies.”
The site offers several new tools to help business owners.
“Our turnkey approach and team of experts make it easy for advisors to open doors at businesses and sit down with business owners with a free service designed to help them plan for their future,” notes Parrish.
The domain name AmericaRebuilds.com uses a pretty interesting method that I haven’t seen used yet. As we know, many domain names used in advertising by large and many small companies use a 301 redirect with the advertised domain name and simply forward it to the companies main site or a specific page matching the advertising campaign. This will almost always prevent the domain name from ranking well or at all in search engines and this can be a problem. Principal does a 301 redirect but in a little more unique way that is helping them in the search engines with the specific domain in the ad.
Upon visiting AmericaRebuilds.com you are welcomed to a very short flash image welcoming you to AmericaRebuilds.com with a crane used in the TV ad. A second after the flash welcome intro image is done, the 301 redirect takes place to http://www.principal.com/planningcenter/index.htm?WT.mc_id=AmericaRebuildsIntro
This little flash intro is helping the site rank in search engines even though the domain name does a forward and as you can see in the URL above, allows the important tracking of the ad / domain. (mc_id=AmericaRebuildsIntro). If you SKIP the intro by clicking the Skip Intro link on the site… they are aware of that as well, because a different URL is displayed if you skip it. http://www.principal.com/planningcenter/index.htm?WT.mc_id=AmericaRebuildsSkip
Allowing the domain name to "rank well" in the search engine helps reduce advertising costs for those searching for the matching terms or domain name displayed in the ad. Search is one form of traffic to a website and direct navigation is another. Many companies that advertise forget about the people who "search" for the site. Not easily allowing people to find your site at the top clearly can lead into missed customers who saw your ad.
The domain name AmericaRebuilds.com was first registered on November 4, 2009 at Network Solutions and appears to have been a hand reg (available to public registration and not owned by somebody already) at the time. Currently, the domain is only registered until November 4, 2010, which is under 3 months away.
A potential typo domain, AmericaRebuild.com (no S at the end) is not owned by Principal. That domain was registered in 2005 to Wolf Run Internet Marketing and forwards to a construction company.
Here is a link to watch the AmericaRebuilds.com TV commercial of the ad that is posted on YouTube as the embedding is disabled.
