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Head of eBusiness at Bupa International
04 December 2005 12:04pm
Some months ago my company and another merged with a large international association. We are now in the process of streamlining processes and methods and writing down best practices.
We have realized that all three companies are using Google Adwords...and the same keywords, meaning that we now as 1 company are actually competing against eachother on the same keywords and thereby raise the price.
All 3 companies are international businesses and located in United Kingdom, United States and in Denmark. All 3 companies are using their own local Search Engine Marketing company to administer the PPC campaigns.
Does anybody have experience in how to handle the above-mentioned set-up or does anybody want to share pieces of good advice regarding how to avoid PPC overbidding within the same company.
Thanks in advance,
Mette Nohr, Head of Web Department
Director of eCommerce at Thomas Cook
05 December 2005 09:50am
Mette,
We face similar issues with a host of our travel brands.
It sounds like you are using three different agencies to to this for you? Unless you assign one agency to manage all three this will never work and you will continue to compete against yourself.
You should still be able to promote all three brands and I think the trick in this is to establish which words work best for which brands and subsequently adjusting your campaign strategy to accomodate each. Using conversion as the priority listing decider. This way the strategies for each word and brand should not compete and if anything should be complimentry i.e. consumers will click through to 3-5 sites off the search so if your three brands are all positioned in the same place with a slightly different target strap line you pick up three of these 'clicks'
By having one organistaion managing the whole campaign they will ensure that the words do not compete and thus controlling your costs.
I suspect you will actually find that the use of multiple brands in the search space is actually a huge competitive advantage if you get the campaign strategies right.
RG
Head of eBusiness at Bupa International
05 December 2005 15:52pm
Hi Russel,
Thanks for your reply.
You're right we are using 3 different companies across the 3 countries (UK, US and Denmark) and we're running PPC campaigns in Spanish, English and in Danish. The thing is that in some countries and markets we are in direct competition. The story is that only 6 months ago we were fierce competitors but the largest of the corporations bought the two smaller companies...where my company is one of them.
My company, which is the Danish one, has the longest PPC tradition and knowledge...and we're the only company that can track conversions and ROI and we have quite a close cooperation with our SEM agency - and because we run PPC campaigns in both English, Danish and in Spanish and because of the size of the budget then we're saving at least 30% in administration and that'll not be the case if we for ex. should transfer the English campaign to a UK-based SEM agency.
I think you're absolutely right concerning the overall strategies, that having 2-3 brands available will give some kind of competitive advantage...but we'll have to have the overall strategy available for all markets and brands before elaborating an online marketing strategy...
I appreciate your feedback - I guess that we'll have to go for 1 agency in the future.
/Mette Nohr
Head of eBusiness at Bupa International
05 December 2005 15:53pm
Hi Russel,
Thanks for your reply.
You're right we are using 3 different companies across the 3 countries (UK, US and Denmark) and we're running PPC campaigns in Spanish, English and in Danish. The thing is that in some countries and markets we are in direct competition. The story is that only 6 months ago we were fierce competitors but the largest of the corporations bought the two smaller companies...where my company is one of them.
My company, which is the Danish one, has the longest PPC tradition and knowledge...and we're the only company that can track conversions and ROI and we have quite a close cooperation with our SEM agency - and because we run PPC campaigns in both English, Danish and in Spanish and because of the size of the budget then we're saving at least 30% in administration and that'll not be the case if we for ex. should transfer the English campaign to a UK-based SEM agency.
I think you're absolutely right concerning the overall strategies, that having 2-3 brands available will give some kind of competitive advantage...but we'll have to have the overall strategy available for all markets and brands before elaborating an online marketing strategy...
I appreciate your feedback - I guess that we'll have to go for 1 agency in the future.
/Mette Nohr
Director at Adprecision.net
06 December 2005 08:27am
Hi Mette and Russell,
I tend to agree with Russell regarding having a competitive advantage by promoting 3 different brands under each keyword. If you are able to consolidate the management, reporting and analysis of the 3 brands search marketing you'll end up being in a strong position. Regarding Google, it's best to not give too much information away about the integration of these brands into one holding company as they are not too keen on having the same "company" bidding under identical keywords.
If you are a retailer with a large product range you may find our Adprecision ESP system (www.adprecision.net) takes a lot of the hard work away in creating keywords and writing ad-text automatically for Google Adwords, Overture and Miva. Our system is automated and can refresh ads frequently based on your product feed.
Please contact me if you'd like more info
Good luck!
Alasdair
On 09:50:35 5 December 2005 RussellGould wrote: