VoucherCodes – Analyse A Real PPC Campaign

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from OnePlus, who had a very effective landing page and a search advert that was, on the whole, good too (although I felt it may have been better by swapping part of the description with the title). Discount codes and voucher codes online are huge markets that web users will search for in their millions, in the hope of getting any sort of discount on any online purchase. With this market in mind, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign by VoucherCodes.
 
To view VoucherCodes’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘voucher codes’:
The first thing I notice is that what I searched for ended up being the brand name of VoucherCodes, which is great for VoucherCodes – it is great for SEO to make your brand name incoporate search terms and keywords for the market you are targeting.
However, it is evident from the above image that VoucherCodes are already organically number one. Therefore, what other reason would they create a PPC campaign for ‘voucher codes’?

1. To ward off competition – By having a PPC campaign there will put competitors off from bidding against VoucherCodes, since there could be the possibility of a bidding war.
2. To use ad extensions in the search advert – Some campaigns do this. However, considering the only ad extension VoucherCodes have used is the site link extension and 50% of the links are the same, I cannot imagine VoucherCodes would have gone through all this effort in PPC to change two site links.
3. To appear up to date with vouchers – Considering that voucher and discount codes go out of date, it is important for VoucherCodes’s brand image to give off the impression they have the latest voucher and discount codes – this is achieved through mentioning the month (October) in the description and ‘Updated daily’: both of which do not appear in the organic number one result.

Therefore, from this, it is clear VoucherCodes have made a PPC campaign for such a keyword search phrase for most likely points 1. and 3. on the list.
 
After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:

Straight away, this is a great landing page within 10 seconds of landing on this for the following reasons:

• The search bar, which takes the central area of the landing page, is responsive and automatically provides drop down results without clicking ‘Enter’ or ‘Search’ – this is great as the web user can find voucher and discount codes for the store they are searching to find online.
• The navigation menu in the top right corner offers three very ‘clickable’ links and a drop down list for all of the categories of voucher codes there are. I say ‘clickable’ just because the links work on the web user’s curiosity as to what the Top 20 stores, what restaurants and in store there are on VoucherCodes.
• The images on this landing page add colour to the page as well as illustrating information to the web user: what voucher codes there are for what websites/stores and how much the web user can be expected to get off.