PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from Nivea, who had, pretty much, a campaign that ticked all the right boxes for being a great PPC campaign that is very likely to perform well for Nivea. You will find that some of the most competitive markets to bid for in PPC are those which sell the same products. For example, there are many websites that will sell the same laptops but at different prices (with different profit margins). Therefore, the competition will be ferocious to find new USPs to entice the web user to covert for them as compared to a very similar competitor. With this in mind, here is a PPC campaign analysis from Cyber Power.

To view Cyber Power’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK , ‘buy i7 laptop’:

As we can see, the competition for such a keyword search phrase is high, with both PPC search adverts and Google sponsored shopping results appearing. This search phrase can be considered a little more niche, than to a search phrase such as ‘buy a laptop online’ since I have identified from previous research that I want an Intel Core i7 laptop. From this, in the opinion of the PPC advertisers here, I am more likely to convert for them as instead of researching laptops, I am preparing to buy a specific type of laptop.

Looking at Cyber Power’s search advert, I feel there are a few areas they can improve:

• They have mentioned their brand name a bit too much throughout the whole advert – 1-2 times is enough.
• I want to buy an i7 laptop – not a gaming laptop. Gaming laptops tend to be more expensive since they have a dedicated graphics card in them. For this reason, the targeting of this campaign is already slightly off.
• The site link extensions continue the gaming focus. It is bad to say that the most valid link I would want to click onto for this whole advert is the ‘High Performance Laptops’ site extension link, since i7 implies it to be high performance.

Regardless, after clicking onto the title of the above advert, I came to the following landing page:

Although the targeting could be improved (since the main central image is of three gaming laptops), the design of Cyber Power’s landing page makes it easy for me to find exactly the type of laptop I was originally looking for. But, on closer inspection, it appears Cyber Power only sell gaming laptops and not high end i7 laptops.

For this reason, this landing page will be running very inefficient. Not every person that searched for what I did will want a gaming laptop. Actually, it is on the contrary – gaming laptops are aimed at a niche segment of the market. i7 laptops and high performance laptops are much bigger segments. Therefore, to try and sell gaming laptops to, well, non-gamers will not work in Cyber Power’s favour. Yes, it will do the job. However, people will be turned off by the prices and even the looks: especially if they wanted a high end laptop for home use or business. This makes it clear how important keyword targeting really is to a PPC campaign.