Coutts Bank
—— I saw an interesting series of PPC advertisements today which seem to follow a pattern with large financial companies, its a trend which I noticed way back with Lloyds TSB. My marketing involvement with the industry of banking and finance as a digital marketing consultant goes back a long way over many years and I often see flaws in the way these large companies spend marketing budget.
When I was consulting with Lloyds TSB I sat in a meeting in London with their PPC agency and was astounded to see how much they were paying for brand based PPC adverts, the cost per click was astounding and this was three years ago. When I got back to the office I wanted to get to the bottom of it as the PPC agency were reluctant to get into the discussion in the client meeting. I quickly discovered to my horror that all the PPC advertising campaigns were sending people to landing pages that were images and that these pages had no content and nothing to fit the landing page algo.
Well as you can imagine there was another monthly meeting held where I immediately took the PPC agency to task and they were horrified that I had picked it up and aired it in the meeting. My position was simple, I had the clients best interests at heart, I had tried to point the flaws in the campaign out to the agency and even stated that I felt the cost per click on the brand terms was way over priced. It had cost Lloyds TSB thousands in wasted budget and what was worse for me is the the fact that the so called experts had been happy to run PPC advertising for a blue chip client in this way.
I have tracked this space ever since and still regularly see poorly run adverts in this space, today I see that Coutts have their PPC adverts showing against the search term business banking and yet in the text the word business is absent and the agency are using the word commercial instead.
Why bid againts business banking terms with an advert aimed at commercial banking, makes no sense to me and it will certainly be more expensive as the advert relevancy to the search term is poor, this is compounded when you visit the landing page, relevancy to the term business banking is very poor.
It seems that some things do not change and that banks are happy to pour money down the drain with digital marketing.
Here is the offending advert – Cost per click for this financial term is very high
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On a seperate point I have decided to run a story on letting agencies in Colchester so lets see what response I get to the story when it gets profile in Google..
