PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last PPC campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from opodo, who had used pay per click advertising to attract web users looking to book flights through them. This meant the landing page had to be a lead capture page, which was well optimized to gain the necessary information to show relevant flights to the web user that they might be interested in purchasing.

With it being the start of September, an area that is commonly quite popular around this time is with purchasing schooling clothing. Therefore, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign from iCademy.

To view iCademy’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘buy school clothing online’:

What is surprisingly about this search phrase is the lack of competition for this. This might be because competitors don’t feel the need to use PPC campaigns to attract web users for school clothing – maybe clothing is generally bought in person for schooling? On top of this, we are at the start of September, which is very close to when the schools return. It might be too late to see campaigns for this search phrase, as many people would have bought clothing already during August.

Regardless, looking at iCademy’s PPC search advert, it is clear straight away that this is poorly targeted. Instead of selling school clothing, it appears that the advert is promoting the opportunity to gain an education through an online Swiss school. Although the topic of schools is related, it is completely unrelated to what the web user searched, resulting in a low CTR and an even lower conversion rate.

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

Just like the search advert, this is completely unrelated to what the web user searched for. The chances are that if the poorly targeted search advert gained any clicks at all, the web user will have clicked away once reaching this landing page. This makes it crystal clear just how important keyword targeting can be for a PPC campaign. To improve the performance of this PPC campaign, it would be a good idea to include some negative keywords in the keyword targeting. For example, it is clear that iCademy have targeted ‘school’, causing this campaign to appear for ‘buy school clothing online’. However, if iCademy had used the negative keyword of ‘clothing’, then this would have prevented the advert from appearing to unrelated traffic that is not interested in online schooling. With this, have a review of your own PPC campaign and look to include a few more negative keywords in it. The more you can prevent your traffic from appearing for traffic that is not interested in your content, the more budget there will be left to target traffic that will be interested.