PPC - Pay Per Click Management

With the World Cup in Brazil just around the corner, I thought it would be a good idea to do a football/soccer related analysis of a PPC campaign since the World Cup is a place where many businesses will make most of their money for the entire year. The last article I analysed in PPC was Sainsbury’s Entertainment, which made clear that Sainsbury’s menu bar, for some campaigns, may not work since it requires the web user to hover over the top of the menu bar to display the drop down list of more links (the problem with this is that the web user has to find out through experimenting with the menu bar). In this article, I will be looking at how Nike have created a PPC campaign based around football.

To view Nike’s PPC campaign, I typed into Google search UK, ‘buy football boots’:

Straight away, it is made clear from looking at the organic results why Nike created the PPC campaign. In actual fact, Nike are not even ranked on the first page of results organically for such as crucial search phrase. Therefore, for them to gain traffic from such a keyword, a PPC campaign is needed.

The PPC text advert itself is very basic and simple which works to Nike’s advantage. Everyone knows Nike already and what they sell. Therefore, they do not need to explain what they are trying to advertise. Instead, Nike have put the description to good use by including two with it with one telling the web user to ‘shop’ with Nike online while the other tells the web user to ‘View the collection’. These call to actions will help make Nike’s advert adopt a high CTR.

After clicking on Nike’s advert, I came to the following landing page:

Nike have been clever here in the sense that they have not shown any prices above the fold. The reason why people buy Nike football boots is because of the quality and brand associated with Nike. Nike wants the web user to be in a frame of mind that they will buy the boot no matter what the price is (kind of like Apple with their products). By scrolling down a little, the price of the newly releases Nike Magista boots are £265 (nearly $450!)! You can see why Nike want to save the web user from seeing the price till later now…

Looking at the type of PPC landing page, Nike have used, what seems like, a hybrid landing page of a click through and product/service page. The landing page makes it extremely easy for web users to click onto any part of Nike’s website while also displaying information of the football boots Nike have to offer that have just been released.

I also mention that Sainsbury’s menu bar may not work with all PPC campaigns out there due to the drop down menus caused by hovering the mouse on the menu links. What Sainsbury’s forget to include was a small arrow by every link on the menu bar like Nike have done. This enables the web user to know that if s/he hovers or clicks on the menu bar link, it will display a drop down menu.