Back in January of 2010 Domino’s® Pizza launched a new ad campaign for its new pizza recipe and heavily promoted the campaign using the domain name PizzaTurnAround.com . I wrote about the goods and bad’s that I thought about the campaign and the site they were using.

One of the biggest things that I thought was not good for Domino’s, was they were allowing comments on "blog posts" they were posting on the site with updates and further promoting. There were huge amounts of comments by customers but a large portion were negative. In one way, it is good for Domino’s to allow the comments because it is showing transparency but on the other hand… all the negative comments do not look good for the company! Comments can be over valued and it is also more likely for somebody to comment if they had a negative experience.

I give them props because they are still allowing comments on the articles at PizzaTurnAround.com in each article they post. Still a good deal of negative comments and some positive comments as well.

On March 30, 2010 Domino’s hand registered a couple new domain names to work off of the first ad campaign. This time around the ad would focus on those people who have yet to try the new pizza! You know, the tire kickers or as Domino’s puts it… the Pizza Holdouts!

Domino's Pizza Holdouts

Domino’s is using the make sense domain name to match the ad campaign’s main message with PizzaHoldouts.com. The site is very similar to the PizzaTurnAround.com site, but putting focus on people who have not tired the new pizza. The site is very simple but strongly to the point! A YouTube video is shown at the top with an extended version of the TV commercial Domino’s is running which shows direct marketing at specific people who have yet to try the new Domino’s pizza.

Below the video is two sections. "Become a Taste Bud Bounty Hunter" which is a social media connection with Twitter and Facebook. The second section is "Don’t Be a Pizza Holdout" which offers 2 medium 2 topping pizzas for $5.99 each with an order button which cross promotes and directs to Dominos.com .

Domino’s did a nice job on this site IMO! Short and sweet and directly to the point. Nice connect with social media and nice cross promotion between microsite to main site with the order button! The domain name makes sense with the ad campaign and they also purchased the singular version PizzaHoldout.com to cover any typo traffic.

Although Domino’s did purchase the typo PizzaHoldout.com, they didn’t do anything with it currently and simply doesn’t resolve, which is a big mistake! Doing a 301 redirect (forwarding) the traffic takes two seconds and is very simple to do. This is upsetting to me because they were wise enough to purchase the typo domain but then do nothing with it!

A second problem that I see. The domain names were only purchased a little over a week ago on 3-30-2010. They launched the TV ads pretty quickly since registering the domain names and getting the site up but this leaves little to no time for the sites to get indexed in search engines for those who "search for" the site. It is always best to launch the site a month or two before running the ad. This will allow some time for search engines to start indexing the site, as your goal is to be at the top for your main message in the ad so those people can find you as well. Direct Navigation is one form of traffic and search engines (links) is another form. It is important to cover both!