Matthew Roche pointed out that Google is recognized by brand professionals as the most influential brand worldwide and Honda apparently wants to find out if this is true - even when it comes to selling used cars. Search for “Honda Used Car” on Google and click on the first sponsored ad.

Honda is hosting the page, honda.googlepages.com, on GooglePages. The predominant brand is not a beautiful Honda car, its the Google logo. And note the messaging… Google [search box]… [H] Certified Used Cars? Congratulations to Honda on an ingenious marketing idea! And the implementation of Google maps is smooth, simple and very useful! Someone at Honda needs a pat on the back.

I logged in to look at stats the other day just to make sure everything looked ok. To my surprise, nobody had purchased since the change.

I fired up Mozilla Firefox, cleared my cookies, and went through the checkout process and things worked perfectly. I dug deeper to find the issue and decided to look at the pages using Internet Explorer. To my surprise, the state field was hidden when using Internet Explorer 7.

Here’s a nice tool you can use to double check next time before you launch “a small change” to your campaign pages. Enter your URL and get a screen shot of your page in all the major browsers. It’s worth the extra time.

Browsershots - its FREE