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
-
Correlating Form Submissions to PPC vs Organic - COA
I currently don't use a landing page model. From either Adwords or Organic you reach our site, find the event product that appeals to you, and then fill out the form. I need a way to determine which of those form submissions came from Organic Vs Paid so I can calculate my cost of customer acquisition (COA). Via Google Analytics I can see that X amount of Organic were submitted and X of Paid. If I get 5 submissions in one day there isn't an efficient way to correlate the form submissions to the medium. Any suggestions on an attribute method that would help me sort out COA?
Paid Search Marketing | | fireflyevents0 -
PPC click-through rate by position
Hey Mozzers, I'm trying to find an average CTR by position in the SERPs for paid search ads, but I can't find a reliable source. Does anybody have this information, or can anybody share their own thoughts based on experience? Thanks!
Paid Search Marketing | | Zoope0 -
How to track in Google Analytics 2 different subdomains (one for website, the other for PPC landing pages)
Hello Mozers! I have a website with organic visits/goals on www.site.com and a few AdWords Campaign landing pages on lp.site.com whose goals are tracked with both adwords conversion monitoring AND analytics (not imported from analytics into Adword). The landing pages of the campaign have nothing to do with the web site (different cms, they don't link each other, totally isolated) and viceversa. Given that, what would it be the best practice to configure Google Analytics to track the website (www.site.com) AND a PPC campagin (lp.site.com)? I have been told to set up different views of the same property, but do I really need that? Please let me know what are you thinking. Thank you very much. DoMiSoL Rossini
Paid Search Marketing | | DoMiSoL0 -
PPC Adwords Trademark Protection
Hi Wheres the form for filling in/registering your brand with Google for trademark protection in adwords ? I can only find an infringement/complaint form, which given no one currently infringing i imagine will be pointless filling it in. I understand its possible to register trademark with Google in the first place If someone can direct me to the exact page will be much appreciated ? Many Thanks Dan
Paid Search Marketing | | Dan-Lawrence1 -
PPC seems to have had a seriously negative impact on organic rankings?!?
We've been targeting a keyword on behalf of a client for the last few months. The page had good content and had been steadily climbing the rankings. It reached a position of #12 and then suddenly dropped off. Within 2 weeks it was out of the top 50 and is now around the 10th or 11th page (useless). This drop off matched exactly with the cleint switching on a low level PPC campaign, driving traffic from this specific keyword. The stats on this have shown a really high bounce rate (so we'll need to ask some other questions about content) - but could this be the reason that organic stats have taken a hammering? If Google associated people landing n that page from that keyword (even though its paid) as not finding relevant content, I'm assuming this could have a negative impact on the organic rank? Any Thoughts Welcome....!!!
Paid Search Marketing | | Purestone0 -
What are the best ways that PPC and SEO can work together?
This has come up recently internally as we are an agency that traditionally only focuses on SEO. However, when asked to articulate the benefits of how they can work together I normally see rather vague and non-actionable answers that don't really translate to real life always. I can understand how you can use SEO techniques to improve the ROAS of a PPC campaign by improving the quality of a landing page. I am also aware of a number of ways you can use Adwords data from your campaign to improve your SEO campaign but I am curious to know. How else can the two channels work together to help each other out?
Paid Search Marketing | | SearchAcademy0 -
Wordwatch Software: PPC Adwords campaign managers heard of, tried, or actively using this?
I've been trialing WordWatch for about a month. I'll admit I've been skeptical from the start. I don't quite understand the results they're delivering or how it works. So I did a search for "Wordwatch review" hoping someone out there could shed some light or help me decide whether this software was worth keeping. But all I can find are two suspicious and badly written posts, immediately raising red flags. (Penuguin should have eliminated crap sites using the Flesch-Kincaid reading level, but I digress.) **Wordwatch premise: **They take over keyword bidding to maximize budgets and clicks. They monitor the Adwords campaign to find an "optimal" bid price. Two questions about this premise: How is it different than using the Google settings for optimize for clicks or conversions? Since Google Adwords is based on a Vickery auction, wouldn't lowering my bid only lower my position? Bearing everyone has the same QS, then lowering my bids to the range between 2 positions does not increase my actual cost. I have Wordwatch enabled for a few of my campaigns. Their interface leaves a lot to be desired. They don't report the activity or the changes they make to the campaigns from the dashboard. I had to go into my Adwords Change History to track what they were doing. And lo and behold they're also adding long tail keywords to my ad groups. Bottom line I didn't notice any huge impact, and I don't see how it's better than Google's own version of campaign settings. I don't know that they're really legit. But their marketing was so convincing, and they raised $1.4M that I need other opinions. Any one with some pro/cons, or yay/nays?
Paid Search Marketing | | flowsimple0 -
Recommend a PPC book
Hello everyone, I recently read Danny Doves book, Search engine optimisation secrets, and loved it. I was wondering if anyone had read a similar book on the PPC side which they could recommend that touches on similar topics such as advanced techniques but also the practical side such as billing and dealing with customers etc...
Paid Search Marketing | | RikkiD220