PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from FairFx, who had a great example of how a search advert should be (with the use of ad extensions) and had a landing page with many positive areas too.

The Euro 2016 soccer tournament is on which means there is an influx of people using the channel tunnel that runs between England and France to travel over to France to watch some of the games being held there (and to travel back of course too). For this reason, I thought it would be interesting to see how PPC is being used to promote the use of the Eurotunnel crossing at a time where it will be used more than usual. With this in mind, here is an analysis of Eurotunnel.com’s PPC campaign.

To view Eurotunnel’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘euro crossing’:

The first thing I notice is the fact that Eurotunnel are ranked number one organically already. Therefore, what reason could Eurotunnel have to make a PPC campaign to bid for a keyword search phrase for which they already rank the highest possible on Google search results?

• To bid off competition from other PPC campaigns.
• To direct web traffic away from their homepage (organic search result) for this keyword search phrase to another area of the website.

From clicking on the advert, it directs web users to the homepage. However, since Eurotunnel have used the site link extension, it can be seen that the the reasons for a PPC campaign are, to some extent, both the two above reasons.

Looking at the advert itself, it adopts a nice structure for which I think will become very popular amongst PPC advertisers in having the rating and site link extension working together in synergy. The reasons I like this arrangement is because it not only tells web users of the popularity of the website and that many web users are very satisfied with the service Eurotunnel offers. But, it enables web users to click onto the area of Eurotunnel’s website without having to use the landing page as a middleman. As well as this, it also increases the area the advert takes up on search engine results, increasingly the likelihood of an web user engagement with the advert. Usually, having two or more site link extensions can crowd the advert. But, in this case, it compliments the advert into a new structure that makes the advert much more appealing.

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

As we have already discussed, this is the Eurotunnel’s homepage as well as landing page. For PPC, it is usually a bad idea to use the homepage as a landing page for the main reason that advertisers tend to do this when they haven’t got the time or effort to make a unique landing page for a PPC campaign. Saying this, there is a time when you can use the homepage as a landing page: if the homepage has been optimised enough to be deemed good enough to be a landing page. With the nice navigation menu layout, large centralised image and form to fill in on this homepage, it can be seen this is a worthy enough homepage to be used as a landing page (and in this situation, a lead capture/click through page).