PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series looked at gear4music, who had a relatively good search advert but a poor landing page at that, This was because what I searched for was nowhere to be seen on the landing page, resulting in a potentially poorly converting landing page. In this article, instead of doing a complete analysis of a PPC campaign, I am only going to look at the search advert of the campaign and do a complete breakdown of it so there are points you can take away from seeing what search adverts are out there. The PPC search advert I will be using will be from Nissan.

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

The first interesting point is the competition for such a brand name. I am not a huge expert on how car dealers work but it seems slightly strange that a Nissan car dealership is directly competing against Nissan in PPC – this seems a slight waste of money unless they know of this competition and have reduced the CPC for both campaigns to make both campaigns run cheaper at no disadvantage from the other.

It is common to bid for your own brand name. After all, web users who search a brand name want to see that brand name. Therefore, if another campaign comes in and swoops that traffic, you would have lost traffic that was interested enough to search your brand name (and not interested from seeing your search advert from searching something similar, which is the norm in PPC). Therefore, if there is a PPC campaign out there for your brand name taking traffic away from your organic results, react to it and get top spot!

The title of the advert is all about brand awareness. This is because after searching just ‘nissan’, by making the title keyword rich makes the advert more appealing to the web user. For this reason, it is a good idea to make your title keyword rich with words from the search phrase the web user used. The title is usually the first part of the advert web users will see so if it looks very similar to what they searched for, this will result in a higher CTR.

The description is two call to actions, which I am glad to see. Call to actions are a great way of enticing web users so to have two (the upper limit of CTAs in an advert) is perfect optimisation by Nissan.

After this, Nissan have used ad extensions to expand their advert. The site link extensions are effective in enabling the web user to find what he or she is looking for quicker. But, what I like most is the location ad extension that shows the web user the nearest garage to them, with a phone call. This could turn out to be a very cheap way for Nissan to get a conversion as, in theory, the web user can ring that number and produce a conversion and never make Nissan pay a dime for the PPC campaign.