Allinhishead.co.uk (All in his head) TV Campaign

Over the weekend I’ve been seeing a 30 second TV commercial that ends by revealing the domain name: allinhishead.co.uk

Doing a search in Google reveals absolutely nothing – the domain isn’t in the index, nor does any meaningful result appear that can be considered relative to the campaign.

Curious, I visited the URL. It 302 redirects to Virgin1′s “chuck” homepage:

Here’s the server header response on the URL from httpFox:

What’s the lesson here? It looks like the creative was encouraging users to visit allinhishead.co.uk which, (via a redirect) would expose the viewer to a TV show webpage.

While direct traffic to the domain is correctly handled, it’s more than likely that some of the advertising will create Google search volume for the domain name, which doesn’t rank at all, nor does it produce a result for the Virgin 1 page.

Using a temporary redirect is probably the right way to go, but before you launch a campaign like this, make sure your domain name has a few links and is in Google’s index, or it won’t rank and people like me will get the traffic instead…

Distilled’s Lucy Langdon was examining situations just like this here. Take a look.

Update: The domain now ranks, literally a few hours later. Turns out this blog post had written about it a few days back but it’s taken this long to actually get in the index. Curious.

Another update (19th May 23:00) – Google’s search results were displaying as Chameleon results up until this evening for the search “allinhishead“. Now, the rankings look like this:

But, searching for “allinhishead.co.uk” reveals a top result for the correct domain.

And, the stats look like this:

Ignore the “head of search” result – didn’t spot that until after I’d done the screengrab