Just stumbled across this PPC ad for Tesco (either bidding on niche beer merchant brand names or using broad match on ‘beer’ I guess?).
Tesco's PPC ads in Google's sponsored links
Nothing wrong with that, and in the light of me hearing that they would be starting to stock a few more North American beers I thought I’d take a look.
Tesco's landing page: good or bad PPC strategy?
Alas, I need to sign in as an existing customer, or register.
Now I’m not really interested in going through the red tape of registering just to see Tesco’s beer range, so off I go on my previous ‘online journey’. So in my case, Tesco’s PPC tactics have led to a potential lost sale.
But I did wonder whether this is actually a good tactic? If I’m only browsing, yes they’ve paid for my click, but they haven’t had to waste time analysing lots of wasted traffic from a ‘tyre kicker’ like me, who wasn’t actually likely to buy.
Those that do register and browse are much more likely to buy, and their web stats should reflect the behaviour of people actually in the market to purchase. Plus, I wonder if this tactic actually has led to an increase in registered users?
By no means best practice, and not quite sure if this really fits Google’s landing page policy, but I maybe the amount Tesco spend on PPC probably Google’s concern over that…
4 Comments
You should never be scared of analysing visitor behaviour. You should especially not turn people away because you don’t want to ‘messy up your stats’. That’s just lazy and stupid.
In some cases getting your brand out there and visible is enough reason to run a PPC campaign, but in this situation I cant help but think it would only take a few hours to create a nicely optimised landing page with offers, tempting pictures and effective call to actions.
I bet if you had landed on a nice page and browsed the beers on offer you would be much more likely to go to tesco next time for your shopping?
You have to remember not all goals are converted online.
I agree actually, especially as Tesco isn’t just an online retailer.
I kinda played devil’s advocate writing this to try to understand why they might have opted for this route.
To me it’s nonsensical to not send people to a relevant landing page, but I just wonder if they have tested it and have done this for a specific reason?
Considering they’ve already paid for the click, it’s daft to exclude people and there’s no tangible benefit unless they really are only wanting very, very pre-qualified visitors to the site (in which case don’t bid on generic keywords with generic ads that link to generic pages!)
I imagine a PPC company has been tasked with getting new sign ups. A facet of there solution was probably to run a PPC campaign.
Blanket marketing like this fortunately is almost a thing of the past. I certainly wouldn’t throw good money at such a untargeted audience.
Alternatively they are targeting a specific niche but aren’t very good at conversion optimization at all!
I’d love to know their rationale. I guess either we can rip up our best practice or they need our help getting better at PPC?!