The last PPC campaign analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ was by PureGym, a local gym that seemed to be utilizing geo-targeting to target those that want to join the gym for the new year, possibly due to having ‘get fitter’ as a New Year resolution. What we found was that the advert was well done with ad extensions, call to actions etc. However, the landing page had fundamental areas that could have been improved. Since the landing page is where the conversion takes place, the whole campaign is let down by it. In this article, I am going to be looking as a web user wanting to buy a bike. Therefore, without further ado, here is a PPC campaign analysis of We Buy Any Bike.
To view We Buy Any Bike’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘buy a bike’:
The first thing I notice is that this is a badly targeted advert. As a web user, if I search ‘buy a bike’, I think what I want to see are retailers and shops that have bikes for sale, so I can buy one of them. I am not asking to sell a bike, unlike what the We Buy Any Bike advert thinks.
Therefore, it can be seen that there are three possible reasons why this advert is so poorly targeted:
- The keywords are too vague
- The keyword research was performed wrong
- We Buy Any Bike are lacking the use of negative keywords
I suspect that it is point 3: We Buy Any Bike have not used negative keywords or have poor ones at that. My only thought of defense for displaying an advert for such a keyword is that if people are going to buy bikes, they might be looking to sell an old one too. However, that is a presumption that We Buy Any Bike have made and certainly does not apply to first time buyers of bikes, which I am sure there are a lot of.
This makes it clear how important negative keywords really are!
Anyway, after clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:
Straight away, this is confusing. I simply wanted to buy a bike (and buy a bike, I mean a bicycle) and now I am being asked to fill in a registration number on a lead capture page?
This is because We Buy Any Bike are not looking to buy bicycles but motorbikes. Again, this emphasizes the lack of well optimized negative keywords. ‘bike’ is usually a reference to a bicycle – if I wanted to buy a motorbike, I would have searched ‘buy a motorbike’!
Even so, I am not a fan of the landing page either. The lead capture area for the registration number is good and bold. However, the background is very dark and the only area of the background where the motorbike appears is covered by text to the right! What more, the text continues below the fold to the point that you have to scroll three page lengths to read it all! We Buy Any Bike, if I were you, I would seriously 1) put in better negatives into the campaign and 2) sort your landing page out!
