American Express® is running a new ad campaign using the domain name ApplyDeltaCard.com . Northwest WorldPerks® miles (Visa®) are now Delta miles due to a merger of Northwest and Delta. The campaign is to get customers to switch to the new Gold Delta Skymiles® credit card by American Express. Customers that were using the WorldPerks credit card to earn frequent flier miles, no longer will due to the merger and have to switch to the new Gold Delta SkyMiles® card by American Express. The miles from the WorldPerks will transfer over to a linked Gold Delta SkyMiles credit card.
American Express does a pretty good job with the domain name they picked for the ad, because it makes sense to the market they are after. It also makes a lot of sense to send customers to a website, because they can apply online at any time, day or night from the comfort of there homes. Although it is a little bit of a "longer" domain, it is better to be longer with the domain name and make sense in the process. The bad thing I think with the domain name they used? The 3 word term just doesn’t have a natural ring to it!
"Apply Delta Card" is not something we would naturally say. Apply for a delta card, yes!
Simpler is always better. Just by hearing the ad talking about Applying for the card, gets that message into peoples heads. I always think the "Actual Card" is what people are going to remember. In this case, it is Delta Card. The term Delta Card is also shorter and easier to remember IMO!
By dropping the term "Apply" from the start of the domain name, Delta Card IMO would of been the best domain name to use to promote the card they want people to apply for. DeltaCard.com, in the perfect world, DeltaCard.com would have been the perfect domain for the ad campaign. The likely reason why they didn’t use DeltaCard.com, they do not own it. Could they purchase it? Likely, as the domain simply forwards to a payment processing website.
One other major flaw with the ad campaign is they are putting a lot of the focus on Direct Navigation. By saying the domain name in the ad, and showing the domain name in print ads will make a lot of people simply type in the domain name into there web browsers. On the other hand, a lot of people will use the term as a "search term" and go to a search engine like Google and perform a search using keywords in the ad. These keywords come from a wide aspect of the ad itself but will often focus around the domain name used.
It helps to own the exact match domain name to the term "Apply Delta Card", but American Express simply uses a 301 redirect with the ApplyDeltaCard.com to a flagship site. Doing this redirect doesn’t allow the domain name ApplyDeltaCard.com to get indexed in search engines. This means it will not rank in the SE’s for the term people search for! This is a problem for American Express, because their ad dollars are going to waste on visitors looking for them using search. This forces even more advertising on the web to "rank" higher with sponsored ads so people can find the advertiser. In this case, it is for credit cards, and those type of ads are Expensive!
