Top 8 powerful creative PPC blog campaigns don’t have to be boring! In the world of performance-based paid search, it’s easy to forget how to get creative.
A fun, innovative, and well-executed PPC campaign can do wonders for your business.
We’ve Researched and Compiled the 8 Powerful Creative PPC Blog Paid Search Campaigns of all Time:
1. Conversation “Domain” Powerful Creative PPC Blog Campaigns:
This PPC campaign is one of our favorites. Converse, the global footwear brand, with the help of marketing agency Anoly, has chosen a new and innovative way to connect with its youthful online audience. They really captured their audience in a fun and creative way.
The agency used Google AdWords to capitalize on every cultural moment by making it relevant and encouraging “conversations” rather than selling their products directly.
They created a campaign that targeted the search terms their potential customers might be searching for. Some examples of this are:
- First Day of Summer
- Spelling bee
- How to Talk to Girls
- How to kiss
Instead of presenting the viewer with an ad, Converse initiated a dialogue through ad copy and multiple interconnected microsites that engage the user in a deeper, more content-rich experience. It allows them to be present to their audience during cultural moments and their long journey to their brand.
2. Snickers – You’re not When You’re Hungry:
While it’s common in the PPC world to target misspelled search terms, Snickers has taken this to a whole new level. With the help of the advertising agency AMV BBDO and Top 8 powerful creative PPC blog, Google, they were able to create a list of the top 500 search terms. Then, using a clever algorithm, they generated a list of 25,381 different spelling mistakes.
AMV BBDO’s Jessica Langdell reveals the list of misspellings that drove this Snickers campaign a surprising amount of traffic.
- even
- Good
- No
- Great
- Certainly
- Strange
- empty
- Moon
- Publicly
- Face
In just two days, Snickers had 558,589 ad impressions. The mini-campaign website yourenotyouwhenyourehungry.com got 5,874 visitors with a click-through rate of 1.05%.
We’re still not sure how the ad agency got Google to approve the campaign, as it’s against Google’s advertising policies to show ads that don’t use generally accepted spelling and grammar.
3. Kleenex Catches a ColdPowerful Creative PPC Blog Campaigns:
This campaign was rightly awarded the “Best Use of Digital Media 2013”.
Mindshare advertising experts have developed a unique adaptive planning strategy. They realized that when people come down with a cold or the flu, they turn to Google, not a doctor.
This vision of a fundamental change in consumer behavior has enabled Mindshare to use Google to geo-target cities with nationwide influenza outbreaks in real-time. This allows them to focus the PPC campaign where it was relevant.
For 18 months, Mindshare analyzed cold and flu research trends and compared them to other data. This included calls to government health services and doctor visits. The model they created allowed them to predict city-wide flu outbreaks in real time.
How effective was it? During the 2012 cold and flu season, 96% of Kleenex UK’s media spending went to regions of the country affected by an ongoing flu epidemic. Total revenue increased 40% year over year in the first two months.
4. A Lesson On How To Find Your Dream Job With Paid Search:
In the summer of 2009, senior copywriter Alec Brownstein decided he wanted a new job. He decided to approach 5 creative directors and bid on their names on Top 8 powerful creative PPC blog and Google AdWords. Brownstein figured that if he googled his name a lot, they would too, and that it would be his way of getting their attention—and he was right.
Because Alec was the only person bidding on the names of the five creative directors he wanted to work for, the average cost per click was only $0.13.
The ad, as shown above, is linked to its website.
The result of the self-promotion of the PPC campaign? 4 of the 5 directors he addressed gave him an interview and 2 of those 4 offered him a job. And the best part about this campaign is that it cost him $ 6 in total!
It was a really clever way to play on the vanity of some of New York City’s best creative directors.
Really tempted to google your name right now, aren’t you?
5. The Infamous Oil Spill from BP:
In 2010, in an effort to manage its brand reputation, BP decided to limit the gallons of bad publicity through paid ads. They bid on over 1000 search terms related to “oil spill” and ranked first for the most part. This allowed them to direct users to a special page on their website called “Golf of Mexico Response Home Page” and explain what they need to do to resolve the maritime disaster.
Fantastic isn’t it?
Well, not really … BP completely misunderstood your tone of voice. Instead of talking to users on a human level, I can only assume they got their best lawyers to write a sentence full of industry jargon to damn everyone confused.
They missed the opportunity to personally address the public.
At Digivate we have a comprehensive process for identifying your target audience using our unique personal search.
We think this was a combination of a media guy who didn’t understand PPC well and felt the need to jump on the BP hate bandwagon. According to ClickZ expert Kevin Lee, BP is estimated to have spent nearly $ 1 million in less than a month, at an average cost-per-click of $ 1.33. This is a perfect example of a good initial idea but poor execution.
6. Ann Summers – Paid Search:
In a series of bold PPC campaigns by Revolution Awards winner Ann Summers and run by iCrossing, they used an innovative way of using paid search as a branding tool.
Their strategy was to raise brand awareness. They capitalized on current affairs by bidding on search terms related to popular news. Combine this with cheeky ad copy and you have an award-winning PPC campaign.
Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it?
Here are some examples of news-related events that iCrossing has bid on:
- Election 2010
- British Airways Christmas Strike 2009
- Chinese New Year 2011
Not only were the ads shown over 1.5 million times, the campaigns were also picked up by the mainstream press. So, the BBC, The Guardian and The Independent have all written Ann Summers’ paid search campaigns.
All that brand exposure only cost them £ 4,500.
The campaigns worked so well because the strategic decision to use these intrepid ads perfectly suited Ann Summers’ brand image.
7. News From Heaven:
Sky News faced the challenge of using paid search to direct users to search for specific news articles. So, to keep up with the competition, Sky News partnered with Unique Digital, which took its RSS feed and ran it through its Darwin Optimiser technology. This created highly relevant keywords for specific news.
There was a pre-designed PPC budget that could be used to track spending on a daily basis in case of an important message.
Why did it work?
The keywords are very specific, which means that the cost per click was low. The click volume was over 100,000 clicks while the CPCs were less than 25p each.
8. Perfumery Powerful Creative PPC Blog:
The Perfume Shop took advantage of the fact that they sell celebrity perfumes to run their ads in celebrity videos on YouTube for six months. Thus Net Media Planet used its Mercury platform technology to bring the relevance of paid search to display advertising.
They have targeted videos of celebrities who have their own fragrance brands, such as Sarah Jessica Parker, Beyoncé, and Peter Andre.
The Perfume Shop has partnered with Net Media Planet to use PPC to increase brand awareness and exposure for The Perfume Shop, while increasing the sales of certain branded fragrances.
They received over 9 million views from ads and achieved a 236% ROI from the campaign.