The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ was from HomeProtect, who had slightly miss-targeted their PPC campaign at people wanting home insurance for their second home, when the majority of people would have been wanting home insurance for, well, just their home.
One area I have had to research into a lot recently comes with hosting for websites, especially when moving from shared hosting to dedicated. Looking into this area, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign from Blue Host.
To view Blue Host’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘wordpress hosting’:
Straight away, Blue Host are struggling to gain ranking in paid search results, either for a low CPC strategy (and cannot outbid competition), or for a low quality score (where the campaigns above them are more useful to the web user). Considering they all seem on the same topic, it is more likely being outbid. Even with this, it is good that Blue Host ranked 3rd, so they are, at least, above the fold, as well as the ‘People also search for’ snippet.
Looking at the advert itself, it is the only advert that mentions a price in the title, which is an interesting tactic to take. Although price is hugely important to hosting, Blue Host deem it as the most important element to purchasing hosting – for me, its the speed and reliability, as well as price.
By mentioning the price, the disclaimer of the price not including VAT had to be included in the description, which is a slightly annoyance, since this small piece of content does nothing to enticing the web user into clicking (if anything, does the opposite).
After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:
This is an example of a click through landing page, or so it should. However, the actual button to click onto, a ‘Choose Plan’ green button, does not appear above the fold. For a click through landing page, this is a big no no. It is vitally important to make sure the landing page satisfies the objective of the page. For a click through page, this is to get web users to click onto the button link. If it is below the fold, then it will only reduce the chances of web users clicking the button.
Forgetting this, it is a really nice landing page. I like the image and the blue tint, inline with the branding of Blue Host. As well as this, Blue Host included reasons to go with them for hosting on the left hand side, helping to providing enticement into getting the web user to click onto the ‘Choose Plan’ button below the fold.
