Carrying on with the ‘sort of’ series, ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ is where I look into a real PPC campaign of a large business looking at the way they have used pay per click advertising to benefit them. In the past, I have done businesses such as Apple, Nike and . Today, I will be looking at the clothing industry with John Lewis.
One of the main points to do with these articles is so that you can implement some of the techniques used by the largest businesses. In some advertising sectors, if you do not know what your doing, it is sometimes best to gain a few helpful hints and tips from a larger business than your own.
The way I found John Lewis’ PPC campaign was through searching ‘clothes’ into Google UK search:
My first surprise is that John Lewis was not actually the highest bidder for the keyword ‘clothes’. You can see this because their advert is not the first advert to be shown. Instead, it is Forever 21.
Looking at the advert itself, It holds every bit of information to encourage the web user to click on it. There are reviews to give web users confidence, an incentive of saving money in the description and links to separate pages, we are guessing, on John Lewis’s clothing store page. Therefore, it can be seen that John Lewis have done a good job with their advert. John Lewis is a business that prides themselves on their quality of service and products: they do not want to look cheap and nasty. This advert continues this brand image John Lewis wants.
Another interesting thing I noticed was the fact they went and bid for ‘clothes’ as their keyword. The problem with this keyword is that it is not specific enough – everyone wears clothes so how can you tell:
- How old they are?
- What gender they are?
- What fashion they are into?
The list can go on. My argument, is then totally supported by John Lewis’ landing page that ultimately lands the web user onto a webpage for women’s clothing. I am not obviously a women. Therefore, the benefit PPC has given John Lewis will be for nothing: no man will want to look at a women’s clothing store? One of two possible scenarios can happen:
- The ‘wrong targeted’ traffic will simply click off the landing page.
- The ‘wrong targeted’ traffic will click onto the right page of John Lewis on their navigation bar.
To be honest, the second option is less likely to happen because web users have a short attention span: they will have seen that John Lewis has already wasted their time and will most likely not be bothered enough to find the landing page they should have landed on from clicking on the advert.
From this, there are a few things we can learn:
- Even for the most obvious keywords, you can still bid on them. Just make sure you know the type of traffic that will be clicking on them so that you know if they will relate strongly enough to your landing page’s content to use.
- If you are bidding on vague keywords, make sure you direct the ‘vague’ traffic to a vague landing page (although it is not recommended to bid on vague keywords because…).
The point of PPC is to gain targeted specific traffic to a specific landing page. This is what will produce the highest conversion rate.
