PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ was from Lindt, who had targeted a search phrase that would compete directly against Google Sponsored Shopping results. Once onto the landing page, it had a nice festive spirit, although it would have been good to have seen more products Lindt had to offer (in terms of advent calendars). Continuing the theme of Christmas, I thought it would be interesting to see what appeared for somebody wanting to buy someone a gift. With this, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign from Buy A Gift.

To view Buy A Gift’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘buy a gift’:

What is interesting about this campaign is that the search phrase matches the brand name unintentionally (from the web user’s perspective). This would help to gain traffic organically too, since Buy A Gift ranks #1. It does beg the question why they have bid for their own brand name, though:

• There is no other paid competition to compete against
• Buy A Gift already rank the top of Google search results
• The main title link of the paid advert is the same as the organic result (points to the homepage)

This leaves it with being the ad extension as a reason to bid for their own brand name. Buy A Gift has chosen different links to show in the paid search results as compared to organically. However, the problem with this is that it is aimed at couples and/or men gifts – this limits the target market a bit too soon for a PPC campaign (this should be done on the landing page).

After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:

Although it is not a good idea to use a homepage as a landing page, there are exceptions to this, where the homepage is good enough to be used as a landing page. For Buy A Gift, this is the case for them:

• The website is nicely themed for the festive season, making clear these gifts are great Christmas ideas for others
• The main image in the central location of the landing page is a timed slideshow, offering ideas more than one gift idea
• There are hints of red around the landing page, which is festive but also encourages a sense of urgency into a conversion
• The navigation menu expands upon hover, allowing the web user to see a wide range of gifts available to purchase
• There are linked images at the bottom, which help to navigate and target the web user to the type of gifts they are looking to buy.

On the whole, this is a very good landing page. The only problem is that there is a lot of content below the fold, for which the web user would not realize unless 1) some of the content overlapped the fold of the page or 2) there was some sort of marker/arrow pointing downwards. The lack of either will risk the web user never scrolling below the fold and interacting only with the content and links above the fold.