PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ came from Dropbox, who had, what seemed like, a great search advert. However, the campaign was let down by the poor targeting of it, where web users would have clicked onto the landing page for either personal or business reasons. But, the campaign was only targeting online storage for business use, making a lot of the traffic who were searching for personal online storage exit the page. With Google releasing their new (or ‘new new’) flagship phone for the year, it is only right that we see how they use their own PPC program to promote it during it’s early launch stages. Therefore, without further ado, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign from Google promoting the new Google Pixel smartphone.

To view Google’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘google pixel’:

The first thing that I notice from this is that Google don’t even rank #1 for paid search results (excluding the sponsored shopping results) for their new smartphone’s brand name. I think this is quite bad CPC management as the Carphone Warehouse above them will not advertise the phone anywhere near as well as Google will do on their landing page.

Another interesting point is that due to the fact Google are ranked lowest of paid PPC search results, they are in fact just above the top organic search result, which of course is Google. The confusing thing is that both landing pages direct the web user to the same landing page! Therefore, was it really worth targeting a campaign like Google have done where the paid option is just above the free version and point web users to the same page? If I was Google, I would have made especially sure I would be #1 for paid search results to give this campaign any significance at all to the promotion of their new phone (and to make the budget given for this campaign worthwhile using and not wasted).

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

At least the landing page is much better than the search advert location. Below are some of the pros to this landing page which makes it, on the whole, a great landing page for web users to land onto:

• This is a product/service landing page – with this in mind, the two navigation menus in the top left are perfect choices: one for the overview of Google’s website and the one below to look more specifically at the product.
• The large blue button in the top right provides the most colour to the page, making it eye-catching and enticing to click onto, of course, which is what Google wants.
• The use of simple light grey text with different size fonts enables Google to dictate what they want the web user to read first, being ‘Meet Pixel, Phone by Google’ and then ‘Buy Now’ and then the description of the phone below the largest font.
• It’s clean and simple which brings more attention to the phone.