The Sun gets PPC right – Heather Mills meltdown

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Kieron

I've blogged before about the challenge of creating PPC ads that stand out from the crowd. I came across a really good example of this today, courtesy of The Sun newspaper. BTW I found this ad as I was looking at the AOL Hot Searches of the week, searching for inspiration and the latest bandwagon to jump on. As you can see below Heather is a new entry at number 3. So in other words a lot of people are searching for her on AOL and the other search engines.

aolhot.jpg

Unless you've been living in a cave for the last few days you can't fail to have noticed that Heather Mills or "Mucca" as she is known has been doing the TV chat show rounds and basically having a bit of a meltdown. So, if you search Google for Heather Mills you will see this ad:

heathergoogle.jpg

Now obviously I don't know the click through rate for these ads but I bet its high. Rather than having some sort of boring ad along the lines of "Read the latest news and stories about Heather Mills at The Sun online" they've gone for some really attention grabbing headlines alluding to Heather's sanity. They then send visitors to this page, full of really good content and videos about her various TV appearences. So well done The Sun, its inspiring to see traditional media really understanding new media and in particular the intricacies of PPC marketing. We can all take a leaf out of their book and start making our PPC ads more topical and creative. What I'm listening to right now: The Dream – "Bed"

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8 Responses to The Sun gets PPC right – Heather Mills meltdown

  1. safesurfer says:
    November 4, 2007 at 7:26 pm

    The Sun has a history of creating eye-catching headlines. It was only a matter of time until they started to transfer this boulevard style onto the Web via PPC.

  2. Ed Kohelr says:
    November 4, 2007 at 10:34 pm

    Great point. If you know the intention of the searcher and can align your ad with that you’ll certainly have better click through rates.

  3. smaxor says:
    November 5, 2007 at 6:19 am

    Send it to a zip submit :P

  4. John says:
    November 5, 2007 at 10:46 pm

    Hi Kieron,

    I know my below questions don’t relate to your above post but I would like to ask them anyway.

    Do you think ppc marketing will grow in the future in the uk ? Do you think there will always be ppc marketing ?

    Thanks

  5. Kieron says:
    November 5, 2007 at 11:52 pm

    John, yes and yes. If not then somebody better tell Google that their business model is in trouble :)

  6. John says:
    November 5, 2007 at 11:57 pm

    The reason why I ask is because do you think cpa marketing will overtake cpc advertising ? do you think they will be be a market for both cpa/cpc ? If so, then why ?

    Thanks

  7. Kieron says:
    November 6, 2007 at 1:12 am

    John, they are both different forms of advertising and I can’t see either going away. This was discussed in the comments section of http://www.here.org.uk/2007/10/the-sun-launch-online-shopping-portal-based-on-affiliate-windows-shopwindow-technology.html

    However its more a conversation for a forum post.

  8. John says:
    November 6, 2007 at 4:38 am

    Okay. Thanks for the link and help Kieron.

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