Having an effective online marketing strategy is a cornerstone for any early stage startup or even a heavily funded company. If you are spending money and acquiring new customers, that indicates that your marketing strategy is right But are funded companies actually spending money and targeting the right base which would eventually help the brand to acquire customers?
I recently came across one example in which a well funded brand is doing it all wrong! Wrong set of customers are being targeted and I’m sure their acquisition numbers would have taken a hit through this marketing campaign.
One would think a company valued at $50M which deals in online grocery will have the best team for their PPC campaigns and would be optimizing to the best levels in order to target the right customers. Well, recently, I was proved wrong. I just googled for “apple macbook pro md101” to check some online deals. This is what i get APPLES from Zopnow !
Landing page for my laptop deal :
Where did they go wrong ?
Probably Zopnow is targeting a keyword “buy apple” without any negative match attached to it, so if someone would be searching buy apple watch or buy apple iPhone their ad is eligible for google search page. Anyhow probably after good amount of impression the Quality Score will go down and their ad will not appear in google search page. But this will impact their overall spend on the online marketing, their cost per click will increase with probably zero conversion since consumer is looking for apple product not the an apple for his daily consumption.
How to avoid such mistake ?
They could have avoided this proper usage of Match Types or Probably inserted right negative matches. For example if “buy apple” would have been made an exact match, zopnow ad will not have been featured on the google search page.
Also they could have inserted negative matches like “iphone” , “macbook” , “software” … and many more to make sure their ads doesn’t pop up when someone searches for Apple products.
The keyword planning and match types are basic for any PPC campaign, its was interesting or we should say little astonishing to see ZopNow featured up there with all apple tech products.
Today when every potential company is getting funded, its very important for them to make sure their marketing efforts and spent are contributing to conversions rather a part of a blog 😉
Well, ZopNow, if you are reading this, please make sure you catch hold of your SEM team.