PPC - Pay Per Click Management

Continuing the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series, the last article in this series looked at search adverts for the search phrase ‘make money online’ which helped key out some tips for advertisers to use when creating and optimising their own search adverts. In this article, I chose to look at adverts I am personally a little interested in since I am going to be publishing a book in the not too near future. For this reason, here is an article analysing the PPC campaign of Blurb who publish and print books for authors.

To view Blurb’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK ‘publish a book free’:

Straight away, we know there is going to be competition for such a search phrase. There are hundreds of website that are begging for authors to publish and print their books through them. It is clear why Blurb chose to do a PPC campaign after they have ranked organically #4. If they want to gain traffic for such a crucial search phrase, it will have to be through PPC.

What is also interesting is the contents of Blurb’s advert. In the title, they choose to ask two questions to the web users. This is a good technique to use since it is making the advert seem more human like there is a team at Blurb that know what authors are going through when they want to publish books. The description is relatively short since it is the answer to the title’s questions – to publish with Blurb. Blurb also chose to have extra links below their description to make it possible for web users to enter different and more specific landing pages to fit their needs. All in all, it is a good search advert that will naturally get a high CTR.

After clicking on Blurb’s search advert, I came to the following landing page:

From looking at the different types of landing pages advertisers can choose from out there, it is clear that Blurb’s landing page is a hybrid between a click through and a infomercial. This is because Blurb want to inform the web user what service they provide (which web users will have to scroll down to see this) but ultimately want the web user to click on the ‘Get Started’ button at both the top and bottom of the landing page.

I have to admit that this landing page is beautiful. Blurb have used everything which makes landing pages successful:

• Minimalistic design to prevent exits.
• Pictures to make the page look better and share information in an easy to read context.
• A video to display information in an easy to digest context.
• Clear and larger font to make it easy for web users to read.
• The only links are to social media websites at the far bottom or the two ‘Get Started’ buttons. Therefore, the fact there is the bare minimum to click on makes the chances that the web user clicks on the ‘Get Started’ button much higher.