PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series looked at Prezzybox, who had, on the whole, a well designed PPC campaign which addressed what the web user searched for and added a touch of ‘Christmas’ to the campaign, to promote buying gifts for friends and families for the holidays. However, Christmas has been and gone now which means it will be the start of the January sales. One new product many people will be interested in purchasing is the Google Home, an artificial intelligence device for the home. Therefore, without further ado, here is a PPC campaign for the Google Home.

To view a Google Home PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK ‘google home’:

Straight away, it is surprising to see such little competition for this search phrase. Google Home is a recently released new product into a completely new market. Therefore, I would have thought Google would want to promote this as much as possible. From looking at the advert, it is not even Google with the PPC campaign but Amazon. This is interesting to say the least since Amazon has the competitor to Google Home, which is the Amazon Echo.

Looking at the advert itself, it is very basic and feels a little generic from being so keyword rich, mentioning ‘Google Home’ a few times.

After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:

My first impressions of this landing page is that Amazon are being very very cheeky indeed. The reason for this is because the Google Home, as of now (27th December 2016), has only been released in the US – it has not yet been released in the UK. Therefore, the reason Amazon made a simple PPC campaign for the search phrase ‘google home’ is so that they can take the traffic wanting Google’s artifical intelligence device and send them to Amazon’s artificial intelligence device: the Amazon Echo which has been released in the UK.

As it stands, Amazon have strictly not done anything wrong. They have mentioned Google Home clearly in the search advert and have led traffic to Amazon.co.uk, where ‘google home speaker’ has been searched for. Therefore, it is not as if they are scamming traffic – Google Home will appear on this landing page when it has been released (which has not been confirmed yet). Until then, the next best thing to the Google Home is the Amazon Echo, which, luckily for Amazon, is being displayed.

This is a very interesting PPC campaign that I think is potentially pushing the limits as to what is morally, or even legally, right. Amazon knows fully well that the Google Home has not been released yet. Therefore, is it mis-advertising of Amazon to make a campaign for the Google Home? On top of that, is it wrong that it coincidently promotes the Amazon Echo, which is the main rival to the Google Home?