PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign to have been analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from NotOnTheHighStreet who had, what seemed like, a generally good search advert and landing page that was sure to have performed well for the online e-store. With Christmas just around the corner, there is no better time to see what adverts appear for Christmas. At the time of writing this, it is the 6th of December so we can be sure to see lots of adverts that will be looking at gaining from millions of people heading online to start their Christmas shopping. For this reason, the PPC campaign I am going to be analysing is from Perkbox.

To view Perkbox’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google Search UK, ‘christmas gift ideas’:

Before analysing it, it is important to note why I used the search phrase ‘christmas gift ideas’. – to get a good idea of potential presents I could give to family members or friends. For this reason, an advert that is an E-store that has Christmas gifts for sale or an article that outlines some good Christmas gift ideas is the type of webpage I am aiming to land on.

Looking at Perkbox’s PPC search advert, it is clear that it is bidding for a search phrase that is just too vague for what Perkbox is offering. If I had searched ‘business christmas ideas’, ’employee xmas gifts’ or ‘work christmas ideas’, then I can completely understand Perkbox’s search advert showing up. However, I feel it should not be showing up for ‘christmas gift ideas’ which could potentially mean Perkbox’s budget is slightly going down the drain for paying high CPC for too vague a keyword search phrase.

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

As already mentioned, this landing page will be ineffective for a lot of the traffic entering onto it if they had searched for something the same or similar to what I have (considering we were looking for Christmas gift ideas for friends and family and not work colleagues). Nonetheless, let’s analyse the landing page based on contextual traffic entering onto it:

• Sometimes, the simpler things are, the better. A good example of this is Apple’s PPC campaigns. However, we need to know some level of detail about Perkbox before we simply give over all our information to them! I feel more information is needed to convert a lead.
• It is clear this is a lead capture landing page from the information needed by the web user to fill in. However, most lead capture landing pages require some level of enticement to get web users to give over information to begin with. For example, Pepsi entered web users who converted on lead capture pages into a competition so they could potentially win something. Although the service Perkbox are offering might be what the web user wants, I think it is safe to say the web user will want to know more information about Perkbox before they commit anything: even information and details about themselves.