Google Competition Post Campaign

INDUSTRY COMPONENT

Campaign Overview

In our pre-campaign strategy, content network was not used to post our advertisement. The number of visitors to the site were not substantial and our exposure has been limited due to insufficient publicity. Commencement of our content networks took place shortly after this situation. There was a decrease in the number of clicks but the popularity increases as we proceed on with more positive awareness of our advertisement via the general public.
On the following week, we expected an increase on the number of clicks. Our approach was to increase advertisement frequencies so as to achieve our goal. Apart from using content network, we performed enhancement to the search engines with better keywords capabilities. This, increases our popularity. Regular ad scheduling was not recommended. Improved and more user-friendly webpage design were created to maximize our effort to bring public attention. However, our click rates were still not ideal.
On the last week, to raise our click through rate, we not only improved our content of ads but started to use negative keywords for searching network and negative website for content network. We deleted some redundant keywords and ad groups, the bidding price decreased. Our click rates increased during the last few days.
Our program coincides with Mother’s Day celebrated and therefore, we added the keyword “Mother’s Day” for two weeks. It had high click rates, but it required high bidding price as the keyword had a lot of users bidding.
Also, there were some ad groups with higher click rate but less impressive, for example, the “special" group.


Traffic and Traffic source

The average website traffic is 100 visits per day. We made a 100% increasing of website traffic to gain store awareness. We set tracking code on May 13th because the manager of the store refused us at first.
The page/visits ratio of “google(cpc)” was lower than average because of the dilution of content network visitors. 812 visitors were from content network with average 5.85 pages/visits.

Campaign performance

All the Ads broadcasted on Google search network except ads in “content network campaign”. The “content network campaign” which was started at May 5th.was targeted only content network. We set visitors who reached “about.htm” and “contact.htm” as a conversion because these visitors might has greater chance to buy the products.
The goal of campaigns “content network”, ”location” and “store” were gaining the store awareness and communicating the store image. We used broader keywords for these 3 campaigns. Campaign “location” had a higher CPC because of its low CTR.. Campaign “store” has a relatively higher CTR because the ads might provide more relevant information about the keyword.
The other campaigns had more specific keywords and ads. We hoped this campaign could reach more customers and provide specific information. We expected more CTR and higher conversion rate of these campaigns but some of them had a very low CTR. The keywords and ads still need to be improved.

Conclusion

Unlike the first two week, too more or less expense, the avg. CPC of the third week has decreased to $0.05 (1123 clicks), which is the goal in our pre-campaign strategy. Besides, our campaign has let the visitors of the store’s website double, 782 (5/30-6/5, without campaign working) to 1603 (5/12-5/18, campaign working).
By the clerk, who is also our teammate, in the store, there were customers going to the physical store thought we didn’t have the reliable index. The customers know the information only found on the website like some seasonal products. Back to our ad texts, by a lot of testing, we found out the appeals of taste, funny and sincere ads are more useful than those ads focus on quality or high-class (click rate 0.05%). For example, the ad we described breads as the bosom of young girl had a good clicks rate (click rate 1.1%). But this is the result of content network, which we positioned on famous increasing. The ads of products could have high rate (the highest click rate 7.14%) by the texts about quality but very low impressions (35 times). We thought the reason is the products campaign focusing on a few but special customers who know what they want to purchase.
Finally, we think we have a good performance in the third week. We successfully separate the normal and special customers, by using different tools (content network and search) and different ad texts (funny and quality), so we could exhaust our budget and have good clicks (2578 times).

Recommendations for client future online marketing

Our recommendation to our client in the future online marketing are:

a.Online advertisement must be collocate with the online shopping website

Our client didn’t do online shopping at the present day, the website is establishing to provide some information to consumers like product, update, location, etc. The problem is the consumer base not only in Taipei; some of them are outside of Taipei district and foreigners. Therefore, we reckon our client to collocate the online advertisement with the online shopping menu. Through this new menu, we believe that our client not only can satisfy the outside of Taipei consumers, also can increase the store revenue.

b.Keep the seasonal product adword advertisement and higher CTR ads.

According our experience when execute the adword campaign, we found that seasonal ads like mother’s day had good impression and click rate. Beside, the cost for the ads isn’t expensive; therefore we reckon our client can keep these ads. We also suggest our client to keep the higher CTR ads, through those ads we believe can improve the brand awareness and brand image.

c.Use online coupon to measure the real conversion

The problem that we faced when execute the campaign was we couldn’t measure the conversion. We didn’t know how many consumers are visiting the store via our online ads. Therefore, we recommend our client to use online coupon to measure the real conversion. Through the conversion result, our client can measure the increase of new consumer and the contribution of the ads for the store.

LEARNING COMPONENT

Learning objectives and outcomes

We want to ensure that click through rate would have positive correlation with number of clicks. As a result, we found out that the relation should be compared on the same base, and this base is decided from the volume of impression.
The impression would be quite different whether we use the content network or not, in our summary report of advertisement, content network offer most of the impression of our ads. But its click through rate has a big gap than other ad groups. If we compared with the time we didn’t use content network, we found out that our clicks increased, but our click through rate decreased a lot. Except this situation, the result is same as our expectation.
We want to know the effect of position preference. In the end, we found out the only influence is that it can stabilize the position of our advertisement.
Because few of people put their ads and bid the keywords in google, it’s easy to get the better ranking and good position without higher price. But if we use position preference, it is more probable to increase our price because we should let our advertisements beyond our control.
Different group members had different opinions on the number of keywords in an ad group. Some of the member thought that the advertisement should have more specific keywords so that people would have more opportunity to see the ad if there was really has one key in the same keyword, and those who click the specific keyword would have more chance to enter the advertisement. The other members have an opponent reason, they thought that the group should be only concentrated on some of the keywords people often see and clicks. Because they considered that it were only 21 days for the campaign, the group doesn’t have many times to take care of all the keywords. Those specific keywords that have no impression would easier be stopped to use because it’s hard to be shown and we can’t expect people really would click the ads when it shown to people, if people didn’t click, the keyword would probably required more money or it would be stopped.

Challenges

Challenge 1：No impressions and clicks at the beginning.

The crucial problem at the very beginning of the campaign we met was the few impressions and clicks. There were less than 50 clicks per day at first couple days of the campaign. We decided not to displayed ads on content network at first because we thought the return of investment might be doubtful and it might lead to a scarce budget. In addition, we avoided broader keywords like “Cake” and “Bread” to avoid spending our budget too fast. We thought that we could only use specific keywords and more targeted Ads to gain a high CTR and low CPC.
We took these steps to solve the problem. (1)Using broader keywords and increasing bidding price.(2)Add more keywords and ad groups to reach more customer.(3)Activating content network. We set a campaign only for content network because we though not all the ads in different groups were suitable for content network.
The impression and Clicks had a significant improvement in search network. We added many negative keyword to make sure that the broader keywords not to generate ineffective impression and clicks. Thought we increased our bidding price, we still achieved the average $0.05 CPC goal at last week because during these 3 week campaign, we were continuing modifying our ads to improve CTR and the quality score of our ad to decrease CPC.

Challenge 2 ：Content network

Compare with search network, Content network has lots more impressions but a lower CTR. Besides, the websites which Google chosen were not all relevant to the ads, and we were doubt the visitors from content network were interested in the store.
We kept improving the ads in “Content network” campaign like what we did for the ads in campaigns with search network. We also added negative websites which were irrelevant to our store but had many impressions without click.
There were 2 ad groups which generated most of the clicks in this campaign. Ad group “chocolate cake” which advertised chocolate cake had 976 clicks and 0.11% CTR. Ad group “Cake” which advertise our store image had 388 clicks and 0.08% CTR. Comparing the CTR, the ads of ad group “chocolate cake” had a better quality, and significant higher impressions than ad group “Cake”.
We concluded that because there’s no keywords to be concerned, a good ad decided everything. Although Content network generated more than half of total clicks with average CPC $0.05, the conversion rate of this campaign is average low in the campaign. We still doubt the effectiveness of the content network.

Evolution of the campaign strategy

In our pre-campaign strategy, we didn’t want to use content network because it has wide display. But when the campaign starting, we immediately knew that the impressions only from search were too low and our $200 could not be exhausted by this rate. So we started our content network testing. At first we certainly had high impressions but the CPC was really high ($0.15). So we created few ad texts and tried to find out the better one, which would have lower CPC. By testing repeatedly, the CPC of third week was down to $0.06.
The difference between these ad texts, we thought was about sincere. In those texts, which had better result, were trying to tell reader that our store is sincere, like clean uniforms or our work hard baker. But in product campaign, introducing our products quality could have good result (click rate 1.59%).
In product campaign, at first we chose famous breads and cakes which we thought that will have high search. But after we created ad texts for every product, the product campaign have the highest clicks rate. We couldn’t know which products could make more clicks before we had tried.
Like the reason of starting content network, we displayed our ads all day without time setting and use some wide keywords, like bread and afternoon tea. But we also used a lot of negative keywords to decrease useless displays. In the location campaign, we even have more than 200 negative keywords to limit the wide keywords like Taipei.

Future recommendations

a.Web design must be collocate with the adword

We found that there are bit problems about the web design. The website is only providing the simple information about the store. If our client is continuing the adword, we hope they can re-design the website and collocate the website with the adwords. For example, when execute the seasonal adword, create a new page that introduce the campaign and when the visitor click the ads its will direct connect to the page. Through this new page we believe can attract more visitors to visit and stay longer in our website.

b.Add new content in the website : recipe for bakery and cake, and execute the Recipe Adword

We found that there are a lot of search for recipe of bakery and cake in the Google or Yahoo search, so we recommend our client to create the recipe content in the website and execute the recipe adword ads. Through this new content, we believe can attract more visitor to click our ads and stay longer in our website.

c.The location map and the contact must be more obvious

We recommend our client to redesign the location map and the contact content. We found that the content isn’t obvious and the font size is too small. Some of the visitors are outside of Taipei , so when they click our ads they will search the location map and the contact, but they maybe face problem to find the store and how to contact our client.

d.Consumer complaint and suggestion channel

We hope our client make create the consumer complaint and suggestion channel. Through this channel, consumer can send their complaint and suggestion to our client and our client can more understand consumer demand and needs.

e.E-paper

The E-paper place is not obvious and the font size is too small, it’s not easy for consumer to found it and subscribe the e-paper. Therefore, we reckon our client to redesign the e-paper content, place and font size.

f.Online shopping

The reasons why we recommend our client to execute the online shopping are:
Online shopping is very common now, even there are competitors but have a good market and prospect

Can attract impulsive consumer and those with sweet-tooth.
Can serve outside of Taipei consumers
Can keep up the quality
Delivery fee isn’t expensive

Through this new service we reckon our client can try the other model of market and hope can improve the brand awareness and increase the revenue.