PPC - Pay Per Click Management

The last campaign I analysed in the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ series was from ieuanthelionshop.co.uk, who had created a good search advert but suffered some drawbacks when it came to their landing page for which did not utilise the main central area the web user would first look at. With the Olympics in Rio, Brazil, just starting I thought to do an analysis that reflects this worldwide sporting event kicking off. Therefore, without further ado, here is an analysis of a PPC campaign by ticketbis (who sell tickets for the Olympics in Rio).

To view ticketbis’s PPC search advert, I had to type into Google search UK, ‘olympic tickets’:

Straight away, there is not much competition for this search phrase considering that ticketbis are the only paid search results for it.

Looking at the advert itself, it adopts the ‘brand name promotion’ strategy for which I recently spoke about in one of my previous articles. This is an effective structure to mention the URL of ticketbis in the title as well as addressing exactly what I searched for at the start of the title too. The description is full of information too. However, they are missing a call to action which would make their search advert just that bit better.

Considering a call to action can be as simple as two words (e.g. Buy now!) or as long as a sentence, there is not an excuse to not put a CTA somewhere in the description of an advert: especially if there isn’t a call to action in any other part of the advert.

After clicking on the above advert, I came to the following landing page:
As a landing page goes, the best words I can describe for it is that it is ‘not too bad’. It is clear this is a click through landing page as there is no obvious conversion that springs out of this page – the idea behind this page will be to help web users navigate to buy the tickets for Rio 2016 that they are interested in. However, with this in mind, I think there are far better ways of doing this than what ticketbis have done. For starters, it is good the selection of events appears half below the fold so that it encourages the web user to scroll down to see the remaining events that there are tickets available for. However, the need for the small text in the central and most critical area of the landing page is not needed, since most web users do not need convincing of buying tickets at this late stage of the conversion process (and neither want to read that much text)!

The idea to have image thumbnails representing each event is good. I like the idea of grouping all of the events to high top categories and upon each click, the choice in thumbnails to choose from become more defined and specific until you find the event for you. Although this route will mean the web user will have to click two or three times to get to the page they want, it will potentiality be much quicker and better looking than the landing page ticketbis have used.