Advantage in PPC for megaspenders like VistaPrint and Office Depot?
-
I sell niche printing and office supplies. Our site goes after certain specific keywords, and we use PPC where we compete against small companies such as ourselves, and the mega companies like VistaPrint and Office Depot. I know about how quality score affects our PPC costs, I was wondering if these huge companies have any other advantage against us in the PPC world. Does their name recognition give them a quality score of 10 on every keyword they buy? Is there a way to find out what your competition is paying on PPC keywords? Do they have other advantages in PPC that I may not know about? Thank you so much.
-
Vista Print and Office Depot don't have Quality Score of 10 for all of their keywords...but I imagine they have QS 7-10 for tons of keywords. They have a huge budget to test things with, many PPC tools (marin, hubspot, mongoose, analytics, omniture, etc) and a team of PPC managers/designers/programmers who have been optimizing their campaigns for years. They also have a high CTR because of their brand name recognition, which raises their QS. However you can compete and win!! You just need to pick your battles. What are your advantages over Vista and Office Depot? Higher quality, faster turnaround, local service? Focus on the areas you beat the big players. Do you get a lot of business from local companies? Create campaigns focused on local geography. If your business is well known in your hometown, Office Max/Vista print don't have an advantage.
QS is the most important long term metric, which is primarily based on CTR. Create compelling text ads that get people to click them. Use as many extensions as you can.... site-link, phone extension, location extension, social extension, etc....these all help increase CTR & QS. When I am trying to increase QS, I only use exact, phrase & broad modified match type...no broad match type. This will generate more targeted keyword traffic and increase CTR and conversions. I also use dynamic keyword insertion, which increases CTR & QS. Also remember that QS is a long term metric, so if you increase your CTR today, you QS will increase in a few weeks/months.
-
To echo what John said, the short answer is no.
The longer answer is those guys have their PPC down to an exact science. If they can bring their CPC down a few cents in a month, it likely saves them THOUSANDS of dollars. This means they have smart people who manage their account, looking for every competitive advantage possible.
I would focus on keywords that target advantages that your business (likely better, more customized service) offers so that you aren't on such an uneven playing field.
-
They don't have an advantage in quality score solely because of their big brand names. They might have an advantage though for a few reasons:
- People like to click links to big brand names, so their ads probably have a higher CTR than the equivalent ad without a big brand name. Higher ad CTRs result in higher quality scores. By no means would I expect all of their keyword quality scores to be a 10.
- They have resources to have a dedicated PPC team or agency, who should be well equipped to optimize their keywords, landing pages, ad text, etc. Then again, I would imagine they're targeting a lot more queries than you are.
By targeting niche items and queries, your ad text will likely be more specific to users queries than theirs, and hopefully you'll see a higher CTR (and quality score) that way. Also, make sure you're taking advantage of all the different types of targeting and ad extensions that Adwords offers!
-
Quality score won't be influenced by the name of the company. I know having the keyword in the title/description and a good CTR can increase the quality score. You can find some information on their AdWords here: Vistaprint and OfficeDepot and (however I would take that would a grain of salt as I don't know how they actually acquire that information). You can search in different countries and different domains from SEMrush.
Hope this helps!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are there any recent studies of organic CTR vs. PPC CTR?
Pretty much the title. I am putting together a "game plan" for my CEO, where I would like to touch on the difference in CTR between SERP organic results and SERP PPC results. I've found a few blog posts that talks about PPC being responsible for 15% of all clicks, where 1-5 organic results are responsible for 68ish % and the rest being on 6-10 and page 2/3. However, I do not see any sources in these articles, which begs the question, where are these numbers taken from? Any suggestions? My own gut feeling (and SERP behaviour) tells me that these numbers might actually be super accurate, but since my business plan will most likely end up in the hands of our board of directors, I would very much like to back up my action points for growth, with actual sources. Thanks in advance.
Paid Search Marketing | | Nikolaj-Landrock1 -
PPC CPC Increase after Website Speed Issues Were Addressed
We recently moved our hosting provider over from WPEngine to Site Ground. We increased our page speed scores from D/F to a B this past week. However, we noticed an increase in our PPC cost per click due to the website speed being slower... we cannot figure out why this would happen. Has anyone else experienced something similar? A PPC landing page we have is---> https://www.medicarefaq.com/medigap/plan-a/
Paid Search Marketing | | LindsayE0 -
Baidu PPC Agency Recommendations
I have a client that is a perfect fit for the Chinese market, but have had issues with reseller agencies that don't really know what they are doing. Does anyone have any agency recommendations? I am only spending a few grand a month.
Paid Search Marketing | | JerrodDavid0 -
Can you market to someone 30 days AFTER they visit your site via PPC?
Hi all, I'm looking to market to visitors 30 days AFTER they have been to a website. Their is a coupon this business wants to run every 30 days to its' repeat customers (and if they purchase again); thus, 30 days more will resume. I'm aware that your remarketing list can capture audiences from 30, 60, and 90 days past. I'm talking about future display ads running 30 days after visitor has cookies enabled. Thanks for your help! Cole
Paid Search Marketing | | ColeLusby0 -
Starting Out With PPC, Need Some Advice
We are starting out with PPC for our site. I wanted to know what the best starting point is for our site. First, some basic info: We sell thousands of products from a large number of manufacturers We can offer the same prices as competitors, but we can't beat their prices Here are my questions: What would be my USP if my prices are the same, and we have the same store policies as competitors? Is it best to start with product pages (as opposed to keywords)? Meaning, setting up a feed via MC and connecting to our adwords account. Any advice is appreciated 🙂
Paid Search Marketing | | inhouseseo0 -
Google PPC Quality Score (adventures in)
We have one keyword that brings our site the most visitors. This keyword is the brand name we carry. We have several years of tracking it in Adwords. For some extended time, this keyword [exact match] has averaged 19 cents per click, 2.7 average position, 4.5% click through, and a quality score of 7/10. We wanted more clicks. We could think of what was needed to increase the quality score. Sure, we could change the meta tag title and the adwords title to be the same as the single word keyword, but this would be less informative. We decided to keep these titles as phrases which include the brand name. First change we made: we increased the bid. After all, it was profitable for the two ads above us, right? We increased our bid from .50 to $1.50. Effect? Average position increased to 2.3 from 2.7. Click through increased from 4.5% to 4.9%. Cost per click went from .19 to .51. The incremental cost for each sale was......well really really high.....this didn't work. (oh, we rank #2 organically. Our organic CTR dropped from 3.2% to 2.9% with this change as well) Reversed back to where we were and decided to focus on the quality score. We realized that the keyword was part of an add group with about 20 other keywords. This word was important.....lets put it in it's own ad group. We then made an "exact" copy of the ad and started up a new ad group. Paused the old keyword. We very quickly realized that the quality score on this "same" keyword was now 4/10. That was odd....lets give it a few days......quality score drops to 3/10 and no longer qualifies for first page. What was different we wondered? AH! We capitalized the first letter of the word. Changing this took the quality score up to 6/10 instantly. hmmm, we thought capitalization didn't matter? Seems it did. We now wait to see where the quality score goes. Saga to continue....
Paid Search Marketing | | EugeneF0 -
What are the best sources for finding competitor PPC spending by category?
Can anyone provide sources for gathering paid search advertising spend for competitors, preferably by category? Thank you.
Paid Search Marketing | | JoeAmadon0 -
SEO for PPC landing pages
After completing several months of on-page SEO for my site (one keyphrase per URL) and getting an "A" from SEOmoz on each page, now I'm venturing into PPC AdWords for the first time. From what I've read you pretty much want one landing page per keyword/ad. So if I want to target 100 PPC keywords I need 100 landing pages. And each landing page needs to be SEO'd as if you were doing it for organic search purposes so that your ad has a chance at a high Quality Score (8 to 10). I realize that an ad's QS is 2/3rds driven by its CTR but in the beginning when the ad is new the initial QS assigned seems to be driven more by landing page relevancy and some historical attributes of the AdWords account in which the ad or Campaign is located. My question is: What, if anything, do you do different on a page designed to be a PPC landing page as compared to a regular page you would SEO for organic search benefits? Also, should you do any of the off-page things (external links with relevant anchor text) for PPC landing pages? I'm envisioning landing pages that only exist to receive PPC ad clicks and that will not be linked to from my site directly. Each landing page talks a bit about the keyword the user was searching on and then directs them to the most relevant page(s) within my site. Maybe that's flawed? Thanks for any tips...
Paid Search Marketing | | scanlin0