When it comes to clothing fashion, sporting equipment and shoes, the one brand most people will look to buy from is Nike (which is officially pronounced as ‘Nikey’). The ‘Analysing Real PPC Campaigns’ has been really successful with articles analysing the likes of eBay, Apple and . The series has now come to Nike: a leading clothing and sports provider that are constantly expanding and diversifying their business. For this reason, I can see it to be very interesting and helpful to PPC advertisers how exactly Nike’y’ produce a PPC campaign.

 

Like with Apple’s iPod PPC campaign, Nike have also become the highest competitor for their own brand name being ‘Nike’. When typing in ‘Nike’ onto Google, the following text advert appears:

 

Nike Official Store | Nike.com

Shop the Official Nike Online Store for Nike Trainers, Gear and More.

 

From there only being one advert makes very clear that no other company would dare try to compete for Nike’s own brand name alongside Nike. For smaller businesses, this is possible and you will find that other competitors will bid for the other competitor’s brand names. An example of this is ‘mazuma’ which has other companies such as envirofone and fonebank bidding for it too.

 

The text advert from Nike is not completely a stereotypical PPC text advert. As well as the option of  ‘+1’ing the Nike page, you have a few internal links into the Nike website which will help web users reach a specific page on the Nike store a lot easier and quicker. The +1 button for PPC text adverts I find does not really do a lot of help for your landing page or PPC campaign. This is because:

• If the web user has any interaction with the advert, it will be a click to go to the landing page. You will not find web users ‘+1’ing the landing page before they reach it. Therefore, it is a waste of space on the advert.
• It is a distraction from a click. If there are more things to click on that don’t reach the landing page, the chances of the advert being clicked on reduces.

The landing page for Nike’s advert will take the web user to a page that will look something like this:

This is the homepage of the Nike store. Therefore, they have not produced a separate landing page for their PPC campaign. Instead, it seems that they have produced a homepage that is also a good landing page. There are social media buttons in the bottom right which will help in produce social traffic to the page as well as PPC traffic. There are lots of internal linking and scrollable menus to help the web user find what they want and the whole page is very nicely organised. My only problem with this page is the focus of the page being an advert for the women’s holiday clothes collection. Nike is a company that has clothes for both genders. Therefore, why would they focus on just females? From this, they are ignoring 50% of their target market. If I was Nike, I would have had an unisex advert to accommodate everyone.

What Can We Learn From Nike?

Although some advertisers will see campaigns with homepages as their landing pages lazy, it can prove to become quite benefical to the success of the website and campaign.

• Nike outbid competitors for their own keywords. Therefore, they are gaining all the traffic they deserve which is when web users search for ‘Nike’  etc. on Google.
• Their PPC text advert is a ‘hybrid’ for the typical text advert introducing more specific internal links and a +1 button. Although ‘+1’ing a page will help improve its rank etc., for a PPC advert, it may turn out to be more of a hindrance to the success of the campaign than a benefit.
• Nike use the homepage of their website as the landing page for PPC. It is well designed page but, with the main attraction of the page being aimed at women, they haven’t considered the uni-sexual traffic from PPC and in theory, every other traffic source too.