The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from Markets.com, who had a great example of a PPC campaign on the whole, where both the search advert and landing page had many areas where it worked well and to Markets.com’s favour to get the conversion: a click onto the ‘Start Trading Now’ button on the click through landing page. With this week’s articles all about going from Blogger to WordPress, I thought it would be interesting to see the PPC campaigns that appear for those wanting WordPress hosting. For this reason, without further ado, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign from wpengine.
To view wpengine’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘buy wordpress hosting’:
The competition for this search phrase is fierce and not surprisingly either – for whoever gains the conversion is likely to be getting a lot of repeat sales from renewing the hosting year upon year. For one, I am a sucker for that, where I went with GoDaddy early on and realised there are cheaper alternatives out there (but, I’m settled quite nicely with GoDaddy).
Looking at wpengine’s search advert, they have not gone for being price competitive since they inclued no pricing in the advert. Instead, they have adopted a strategy of:
- Getting top spot by adopting a high CPC (but also dependent on their quality score).
- Advertising themselves as the ‘best’ host online.
Saying this, I am not sure having a phone number would really help the advert, since a lot of web users would look at the features of the hosting first and only call a number if they need support. As well as this, I am also unsure about the ‘Better Business Bureau’ comment is something that would help the advert too, since just states that wpengine is a ‘rated business’?
After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:
First impressions of this landing are that it is very good. It is difficult to determine what type of landing page it is from first impressions. However, after scrolling with the different hosting packages appearing, it is clear it is a product/service click through landing page. Below are the main positive points to this landing page:
- The pop up to chat to someone – this is a great feature since, for many website owners, having a good customer support with their hosting provider is crucial to their decision as to who to go for. Therefore, from having such freely available customer support to a human makes wpengine seem a good choice for hosting, when looking at it from a customer support point of view.
- The central area of the landing page is filled with an image as the background – this is a particularly useful way to portray an emotion or reaction from the web user, which wpengine have done by comparing their pricing to a typical cable plan.
- The design is minimalistic but colourful, which will help to keep the bounce rate low.
- The list of features of each hosting platform, upon scrolling down, is laid out cleanly and clearly, making the choice of hosting plan easy to pick.
My only criticism of this landing page is the fact that the pricing is all in dollars, which is poor considering I am currently in the UK! For some, that would be enough to put them off the hosting.
