The last article in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series had a look at Fitbug who had, what can be seen as, a very disappointing PPC campaign that had an advert in the wrong format and a landing page that lacks the ability to gain a high percentage of conversions from PPC traffic (for whatever their conversion was). From analysing campaigns, I have realised that I have stuck to ‘normal’ types of businesses. However, the reality is that every business out there uses pay per click advertising. For this reason, I will be looking at a very large popular brand in the clothing industry: Ralph Lauren.
To view Ralph Lauren’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘Ralph Lauren’:
It seems that Ralph Lauren has created a campaign for their own brand name. This is not uncommon in PPC and there are a few reasons for Ralph Lauren doing this:
- To send web users to a different page other than the homepage. Ralph Lauren are organically #1 which will send web users to their homepage. However, Ralph Lauren may not want this but instead want to advertise a different sector of their website: such as a new range of clothing.
- To scare off competitors – If Ralph Lauren are bidding for their own brand name, it will scare of competitors from bidding for ‘Ralph Lauren’ as they are unlikely to get top spot.
- To share information with the web user. It is clear from Ralph Lauren’s advert that they have done this since they have ad extensions such as the review extension to share information that might encourage web users to shop with them.
Overall, this is a good search advert that does look like it will get a healthy click through rate.
After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:
What is clear straight away is that Ralph Lauren have a pop-up lead capture page as their first landing page. However, this is not the permanent landing page since you can close this pop-up lead capture box to view the actual landing page:
This is the landing page web users will land on after closing the lead capture box. In actual fact, this is the homepage of Ralph Lauren. This interestingly brings the forward the point about why Ralph Lauren made a PPC campaign for their own brand name. It seems that Ralph Lauren made a campaign primarily to:
- Scare off competitors.
- To use ad extensions to send web users to different sectors of the website.
- To share information that will encourage web users to shop with Ralph Lauren such as their high ratings.
Although it usually not a good idea to use a homepage as a landing page, I think this homepage by Ralph Lauren makes clear that an extremely well designed homepage, where you have a intention in PPC to let the web user roam the website, works well as a PPC landing page.
