The last article in the series ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ looked at the search adverts that appeared for the search phrase ‘smarpthone 2015‘. This enabled three adverts to pop up from Apple, Samsung and Microsoft of which I analysed each one separately and came to a conclusion at the end. In this article, I though I would look at a car company since it is that time of year, just before summer, where a lot of people that start to think about changing their cars for the summer. In this article, I am going to be analysing PPC campaign from the Italian car manufacture Alfa Romeo.Â
To view Alfa Romeo’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘alfa romeo’:
Straight away, it is interesting why Alfa Romeo have made an advert for their own brand name considering they rank organically number one (of course). But, after closer inspection, the organic #1 result has site link extensions to used and used approved cars. This is okay. But, I am sure Alfa Romeo would rather sell new cars rather than used ones (which is made clear by the site link extensions used for the search advert).
The advert itself is also very well optimised. It includes the brand name, a call to action in the description along with figures to convince the web user into a click. Therefore, up to now, it can be deemed the the Alfa have done a good job up to now in PPC.
After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:
The thing I notice is the dark background. I Â know Alfa Romeo are trying to make their cars exciting and appealing. However, the black background makes the whole landing page look just too dark and gloomy. Instead, I would have gone for something lighter in colour, potentially with the images of the cars on some Italian windy road as that is what every who buys an Alfa wants to go on!
There are some good points to the landing page. Alfa Romeo have a links to all of their cars in the top left and the main attraction of the landing page (centre area) is of a slideshow of three different variations of the Giulietta. The only problem with this, though, is that the web user did not type in ‘alfa romeo guilietta’ – I searched for ‘alfa romeo’. Therefore, I feel the slideshow should not show three variants of the same car but three different cars altogether. It seems like this landing page would be better suited to traffic that Alfa Romeo knows for sure are only interested in the Alfa Romeo Guilietta. However, they cannot be sure from a web user who searched for just ‘alfa romeo’.
This brings the point forward that, in PPC, you cannot assume that because the web user searched ‘this’ means they are interested in ‘that’. Always make sure your search advert and landing page are related completely to what the web user searched for in the first place since to gain a conversion, you have to satisfy the web user first.
