Big Brands - It's Time for a Stand-off With Your Paid Search Agency
9
Nov
2009
Author:home james@ 10:52 AM
We all know that online ad spend has recently outstripped TV for the first time but where’s it all going? Before I answer that, here are some of the stats.
The first 6 months of 2009 saw online spend hit £1.75bn, over £100m ahead of TV at £1.64bn, but this includes all online spend on the assumption that it’s a single channel and therefore comparable to TV. That is the case but if we broke down the components of the spend, search, the biggest of online, wouldn’t outperform TV on its own. Not all online is enjoying growth either. For example, in the first half of 2009, online ad revenues fell by around 5% to just over £310m (<20% of online) compared with the first half of 2008. But in all this, it’s no surprise to learn that the favoured son of online was paid search with a year on year increase of 7% and it accounted for about 60% of all online spend at just over £1bn.
"It absolutely pains me beyond belief to see how badly managed some of the bigger brand campaigns are."
So there’s been a definite shift to paid search and the traditional media-buying agencies seem to be profiting from this shift – just check out any of the top 100 lists.
So where am I going with this? I’ll tell you. It absolutely pains me beyond belief to see how badly managed some of the bigger brand campaigns are. There’s clear lethargy on behalf of the agencies to pull their fingers out and manage the campaigns at the micro-level clients have come to expect from the smaller, more specialist agencies. I’m confident the specialist agencies would reduce CPAs by up to 50% on most of the big brands and it’s really easy to see why.
Take a quick look in financial services at Tesco’s, Aviva’s, HSBC’s, or Barclays’ campaigns and you’ll see poorly optimised ads with little use of keyword inclusion, very few of them using sentence case for increased standout, and some even omitting optimised destination URLs – sacrilege.
"why do these brands tolerate such indifferent campaign management?"
Then move across to travel and look at some of the big brands; Thomson, lastminute, Emirates & Virgin Atlantic are just as bad. With really poor creative similar to those above, there’s also little use of deep linking into the relevant site pages. In addition, there’s rarely any evidence of specifically designed PPC landing pages; pages with all other distractions omitted and very powerful combinations of strong offers & prominent calls to action.
I did the same across mobile phones, cars, jewellery and found the same problem recurring again & again.
So why do these brands tolerate such indifferent campaign management? Because they're probably hitting target. What they don’t realise is, their targets are probably too soft or campaigns are being managed to CPA whilst the challenge of simultaneously increasing volume isn’t being met. I remember when we went head to head against 2 big London agencies at my old place to win the PPC account for firstdirect and outperformed them around 3-fold but, prior to our involvement, the client was reasonably happy because the incumbent had always been around the target CPA.
Specialist agencies are a must if you want the best from your campaigns and the weak campaign management by some of the bigger, more traditional media agencies is clear. Big brands - if you want more for your money, you should be talking with the specialists.