Case Study - tastecard - PPC

Objectives

After a successful 4-6 week trial in September 2010, bigmouthmedia started to work with tastecard in January 2011 to design and implement a PPC campaign aimed at promoting the tastecard dining card special offer.

The goal of the campaign was to deliver qualified traffic to the landing page and get users to sign up for a one month free trial of the tastecard dining card, which offered 50% off the food bill at over 5,000 restaurants in the UK, whilst keeping the CPA at a low level.

Our Solution

Bigmouthmedia designed a PPC campaign targeting the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) as well as the Google Display Network, planning to also roll it out to other search engines. The key campaign elements included:

Audience-focused targeting

The campaign a on capturing the interest of users looking to save money when dining out, and it included text ads in search engines featuring key terms as well as ads in sites with content relevant to the target audience. This consisted of individuals interested in gastronomy and eating out, such as users of restaurant review sites and foodie blog sites, and individuals keen to save money, regulars of sites focusing on money saving advice and offers such as moneysavingexpert.com and vouchercodes.co.uk.

Brand and location-based keyword strategy

The tastecard scheme features restaurant chains that are household names in the UK and hence have a strong brand visibility on line. Bigmouthmedia used this to the campaign’s advantage by bidding on generic restaurant names. In addition to that, the team used that awareness to target specific locations.

Landing page redesign

To effectively support the PPC efforts, bigmouthmedia worked with the client’s web development agency to build an attractive landing page featuring the logos of the restaurants tastecard had partnered with, as well as the specific layout that best practices suggest making sure the information communicated to consumers was concise. This would be detrimental to enhancing conversions and hence reducing the CPA.

Close monitoring through Google Analytics

Keeping a close eye on the conversions was a big part of the campaign, and to that purpose bigmouthmedia set up a completely new Google Analytics account to track the “goals” of the site, i.e. users signing up to the free tastecard trial. The account specifically monitored the conversions coming from the three search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing, and the data provided was invaluable to ensure the CPA remained under the limit set by the client.