The ECU girls, once again! =)

AMAZING Result!

Semi-Finalist in the "Final 15" judging round! I can be honest about saying that I was completely shocked when I saw the results. While our campaign was a success and I thought our pre and post campaign reports were good, it is still crazy to imagine yourself as a semi-finalist. Yes, we didn't win..obviously..but to be recognised like this is amazing and I am very proud to have been part of such a great team.

What makes it even more exciting is that we are receiving certificates, woohoo! I'm a fan of certificates (gotta make that CV look good) and I know Calli and Sarah will be pleased too!

I'm sure you will see more of us three girls..taking the world by storm..in our own little way! :D

OMG! Top 15 - Top 5!!

I cannot believe it!
"J'en reviens pas! Ca dechire!" like we use to say in France!

We made it against 2,187 student teams! :p
It was already an amazing experience, and we get results! So happy!

Well done girls!
We have to celebrate soon!!!

Sarah

Top 15!

Well.. the results are in. Much to my utter surprise and delight... wait, more than that.. I am totally stoked! Our team made the Top 15... to be precise we are ranked #10.

Well done girls!! My goal coming into this Challenge but to put my marketing knowledge to the test, enjoy the journey along the way, and just do my best, and I couldn't be happier with our result.

Some..advice

Since the Challenge is over, there is nothing really much to blog about these days. Advice is always needed so why not some advice for next years Challenge participants. This is my personal advice but I'm sure Calli and Sarah will be happy to blog soon enough with their words of wisdom. So what advice shall I give?? Read along my bloggers....

Quick Tips To Succeed In The Google Online Marketing Challenge

1. Research & Learn as much as you can about AdWords
2. Pick a client that sells products and is someone who shows an actual interest in the challenge
3. Know your target market
4. Work as a team and help each other out
5. Schedule meetings to discuss the Challenge
6. Website Optimisation and choice of landing pages is key
7. The content network is either your friend or enemy, find out asap.
8. Geo-targeting is important and can affect the success of your campaign
9. Keep note of your progress..a blog is a good idea! :D


- Natasha

Life After The Google Online Challenge

After three weeks of CTR's, CPC's, Keywords, Impressions and Adgroups..the challenge is now over!

I'm sure you are interested in how our campaign went so I have included our results below.


Impressions 104,826

Clicks 223

CTR 0.21%

Avg CPC $0.80

Cost $178.13

KeyWord w/ Most Clicks 'pilates perth' 20
Keyword w/ Highest CTR 'verve gym for women' 100%
KeyWord w/ most impressions 'yoga' 2,588

Ad with Most Clicks 26

Women's Only Boot Camp
4-Week Kick Start Program
Lose Weight and Feel Great.
VerveForWomen.com.au/bootcamp

Ad with Highest CTR 50%

Personal Trainer Perth
Womens Only Health Club.
Get Results. Stay Fit For Winter.
VerveForWomen.com.au/PT


Most Successful Campaign - Memberships
0.45%

I speak for the group when I say that this has been an unforgettable experience. There were definitely times when the word google gave me a headache but I have learned so much from this challenge that I wish I could do it again. The first week was a bit of a blur because everything was new to us and it was our experimental stage. We didn't change anything because we wanted to give all of our keywords and adgroups a chance, aww. Once we realised that the content network was NOT working in our favour, we turned it off and saw a CRAZZZY decrease in impressions. Just look at the differences in impressions while the content network was on and when it was turned off.

Week 1 Impressions *Content Network ON*
- 86,384

Week 2 Impressions *Content Network OFF*
- 11,911

Week 3 Impressions *Content Network OFF & Budget Increased*
- 6,252

While the content network may be great for a lot of products, we believe it isn't as helpful when selling a service.

We didn't get the CTR we had hoped for but we are still happy with the overall campaign performance. Our client wasn't as niche as we thought it was and our specific ad copy was TOO specific. We found that our more generic ads received more clicks and our niche ad groups such as postnatal fitness and mums were unsuccessful.

The girls and I are now busy working on our post-campaign strategy, powerpoint presentation AND personal reflections. The challenge may be over but we are STILL working hard. You will also be able to hear more from us girls once my online magazine is up and running. This challenge has given me the Internet bug and the online magazine I have always wanted to have will be created soon. Calli who owns a website design company *http://www.delishdesign.org/* will be designing the website. Sarah has offered to create the magazines logo and help with graphics. I will be the editor-in-chief and have already got some writers volunteering their services. The ECU Girls are going to take the Internet world by storm!! lol

- Natasha

Day 11..

Good Evening Everyone..
We are now in the middle of the challenge and well, after a brillant sucess with our pre-campaign strategy (well done girls :p), we are a bit concerned about the time we will have to write our post's one, which is apparently due few days after the actual campaign finishes. Anyway, we're already thinking about it and we'll try to do our best!

Our CTR is now higher as we removed the content network from our campaign settings
(that one has generated many impressions but few clicks in comparaison), but yeah we still need to improve our ads. We might do some changes next thursday and increase the budget as we didnt spend half of it yet.. hope the 10more days left will be full of surprises!

Winter is coming and so does the exam period... Im a bit stressed, but heyhey that means holidays are coming too.. Im flying back to Reunion and to France for more than a month; Lucky me :p Just have to be patient til then (its not really hard as the challenge keeps me quite buisy!)

Sign off for now..

- Sarah =)

The First Week

Our first week 'review' was held on Thursday. We were able to discuss the results so far and some of the factors we need to consider to create an increasingly 'successful' campaign. This 'game' has been a lot harder than we thought!

First of all.. what IS successful? High CTR? Or High Impressions? We believe a high CTR portrays success. Therefore, we've tweaked the campaign as follows.

The majority of our impressions were on the content network on sites which were medium to highly unrelated to our business or target market. Check this out.. it gave us a laugh:

Anyone for a six pack? Well our site is a women's gym. We did get a click from this site though! And just because we're offering women's fitness programs doesn't mean we can help you include children in your wedding vows! We had around 8000 impressions on Gmail, and also lots on MySpace. Considering how broad the content on these sites can be, no wonder our CTR from them was around 0.10%.

We did get some clicks off the content network, and in reality as a business owner I'd probably still place my ads on there to cast a wide net.. but it was dragging our average CTR way down. So we decided for this week we'd test our campaigns just on the Google and search networks.

Also, we discovered one of our campaigns was set geographically for Australia, not Perth. 1000s of impressions were wasted in VIC, NSW and QLD. All fixed. This is certainly a learning experience!

The past two days have seen our impressions in the hundreds not thousands (due to content network removal).. however the CTR has risen due to more targeted impressions.

Until next time...

-- Calli

have a peek..

at this:

http://www.ecu.edu.au/pr/InsideECU/2009/04/ecu-students-use-google-to-help-small-business/

Day 1: HERE WE GO

Good Evening my bloggers!

At 12 this afternoon I had the nerve racking task of activating all three of our campaigns. The word PAUSE went *poof* and all I saw was the word ACTIVE in green for most of our ad texts. I quickly glanced at our account snapshot but to much sadness, there were NO clicks, impressions or anything that would make me less nervous.

TWO HOURS LATER

After some hard working cardio on the bike and some yoga to relax I logged back in and to my surprise and utter joy this is what I came across.


8 CLICKS and THOUSANDS of Impressions!

I became so excited I quickly messages Sarah and Calli who had already emailed me about it. While it may not be a lot of clicks, knowing that someone has clicked on one of our ad's is very gratifying and a big RELIEF. As a group we have created dozens of ad texts and have thought of at least a hundred keywords, so to see 8 clicks after 2 hours was real nice.

PROBLEMS ALREADY?

Ohhh-k, they are not real big problems but we have already recognised areas where we can definitely improve in. For one, we need to really make our keywords and ad texts specific because we do have a lot of ad's and a wide range of keywords. The campaign for memberships is not doing so well, whereas the campaign for group classes is doing really good. Daily spending so far has been good, and with only 10 minutes 'till the end of today's campaign we still have $2.11 left over from our daily budget. Google also contacted us through email, because a few our URL's were not working. I managed to fix this and we will keep note to type in correct URL's. There are many areas where we can improve and we intend to use this first week of the challenge to experiment with adwords and take notes of the pros and cons of certain keywords and ad texts we use.

WE EVEN HAVE A SCHEDULE

Because we are soo committed to this challenge we created a weekly schedule for the group. The schedule has allocated time slots for each team member regarding their "shift". The "shift" involves looking over our AdWords account while the other team members are working or at uni. I had a long shift today but I know Calli and Sarah had a peek to see how our ads were going.

Hmm, looks like I can't upload any images at the moment??? I was going to show you a screen shot of our schedule and the today's end results. Oh well :(
Slow internet is so painful for me, Prime Minister Rudd..bring on the new digital revolution now!

SLEEP TIME
My shift is officially over and so is today's campaign! This is definitely going to a fun experience and I am already learning so much. Good luck to all the other participating teams, especially everyone from ECU!!

Goodnight, Natasha!

P.S We finished today with:

Clicks		13
Impressions		20,354
CTR		0.06%
Avg. CPC		$0.52
Avg. CPM		$0.33
Total Cost		$6.79

Three Weeks of .... (insert word here)!

Our three weeks start on Friday. We're entering the ever-expanding world of Internet Marketing. The internet is by far the fastest growing industry, and source of opportunity, out there and it will only get bigger. There are social networking sites popping up all over the place. I have upgraded and matured from MySpace and Facebook, to LinkedIn, for professional networking, and Twitter (which a lot of companies are now using to help increase the flow communication to their clientele).

How would I describe this experience? I'm speechless. There are no words to describe being in 2nd year PR, and tackling a real-world situation where we're competing with REAL PROFESSIONALS. Some of these people are on excess of $150K a year because they're so good at what they do. We knew absolutely nothing about AdWords (I didn't even know thats what those little boxes were!) - now we're immersed in a sea of knowledge and information.

I have learnt, from my position as a Marketing Manager, that there is no substitute for work experience. I feel that my job puts my worlds in front of my classmates because I deal with Integrated Marketing Communications all day long. I don't study a unit, and forget about it - out of site out of mind. The Google Challenge will place myself, Sarah and Tash, as well as our student buddies at ECU and around the world, in an absolutely fabulous position. This will give us a huge advantage over our competing job applicants in the future. This challenge has now inspired me to strive towards a role in Digital Marketing. I could do this for a living!
--Calli

Happy Easter

Happy Easter to everyone.

Hope you all have had a great weekend and enjoyed all the BAD BAD Easter eggs.

Challenge starts next Thursday and we are ready to kick arse!

Again, hope you all are having a great Easter and remember your blessings!


- Natasha

Pre-Campaign Strategy

Hello Hello

We haven't blogged for awhile so here I am, updating you with whats been happening. Our group has been working hard on the pre-campaign strategy which really has been a pain the bum. FOUR PAGES? 1.5 SPACING? We thought this was ridiculous but after 3 hours of editing and using the MAGICAL thesaurus, we cut down our strategy from 6 to 4 pages. Calli's reaction to our page decrease was a memorable scream that led us to getting told off AGAIN in our good ol QUIET study room. ECU won't be telling us off if we win ha-ha.
We were also a bit confused with the marking criteria because Google and ECU have separate guides which was frustrating. The areas we are still not sure about are
- Sales
- Key online marketing personnel
- URL, website age, website management
- Projected and historical online spend for the industry
- Market position/specialties
- Number of Ad Groups and Focus for the Ad Groups

While these areas where stated in the Google Marking Guide, they weren't in the ECU marking guide so I have contacted our unit co-ordinator Peter Ling about it.

Michael who is the owner of Verve did contact us and was happy with the pre-campaign strategy. He did alert us to a new bootcamp class that Verve will be providing which, will be a great AdGroup in my opinion. Once all of us was happy with our editing I emailed Peter the pre-campaign strategy and received his feedback yesterday.

His reponse = "Wow, you girls have written an excellent pre-strategy report!"

I was so happy, I squealed YESSSS! There are still improvements that need to made but at least we are going in the right direction. I guess our enthusiastic nature is really helping in this challenge. Just look at this photo that Sarah took during the making of the Pre-Campaign strategy.


We didn't even have time to smile for the camera! Oh and that lovely water bottle next to my laptop is NOW MISSING! I left it in the lecture room and someone STOLE IT! Not happy at all lol.

Anyways, thanks for reading and if any other groups have any suggestions or tips on the pre-campaign strategy or AdGroups please feel free to email us. Any advice is really appreciated.

THE CHALLENGE IS ONLY WEEKS AWAY.

- Natasha

Hi! Hola! Bonjour! Halo!

Here I am! Finally!
After all I've been trough with my computer ( be carefull even Mac crashed sometimes!) I finally decided to use one of the e-lab to post this article on our "fantastic" blog! (you're right Tash, this word has a special effect)

Lets introduce myself first,
My name is Sarah and Im from Reunion island.. Which is actually the best place ever!
You gonna tell me: So, why are you here?
To be honest, I am not really sure..

I've always wanted to travel, so after my graduation I choose Australia over France ( I mean Paris) to continue my studies... Australia seemed to be, at this time, the ideal place; I could learn another language, the weather would not be as good as in reunion, but yeah, still.. and it was only seven hours by plane from my native island!

Thus I've been here for a year and a half and I really enjoy Perth!

Concerning studies.. I spent a year at Central Tafe, doing a diploma of Mass Communication,
what leaded me in second year at ECU. Im actually doing a Bachelor of Communication with a double major in Advertising and Creative Services. Im really enjoying being at Uni, even it is pretty hard for me to study in a language that is not my mother tongue.. Sometimes I dont feel like I can handle everything but, anyway, we will see at the end of the semester.. I'll do my best =)

Ive decided to take part in the Google Marketing Challenge because the simple name"Google" attracted me!
The others assessments seemed also to be boring (and Im not really confident about writing essays in english!)
I think Challenges are always good, you have a lot to learn from ,and it is always a good experience too..!
Moreover, Im a kind of Internet person, I love spending my free time on the web..

About my team.. Well, Calli and Natasha are amazing! They're working hard and I wish I could do as much as them..
But as an international student, I get easily lost =/ especially when its about reading pages and pages.. but again, Im trying to do my best and I adore working with native speakers! At the end of the semester, I'll be more than fluent!! :p

Back to the campaign..
Today, during our usual meeting, we finalized our pre-campaign strategy ( as you can see in the picture, my colleagues are more than focused!) But because of technical problems,we did not send it to our client yet.. that should be done soon..
To sum up,we still need to send our pre-campaign to Verve Active ( one other team has done it already rrrhhhh!) then we have to prepare our oral presentation ( which is only a 5 to 10 minutes speech about our client and some adwords we are going to run with.. that will be in our next week lecture; in hurry to hear about what the others' ideas!) And finally we'll need to write the personal reflection report.. before the actual campaign starts.. Wooah that's actually coming soon!

That is all I've to stay, for now..
Oh no, I almost forgot, I've got a new place, hihi!=)

A library full of know-how

I thought I'd make a quick post while I'm at uni in the lab researching for this project. Sarah, Natasha and I have a major amount of reading to do. In particular, we need to educate ourselves on the ins and outs of how Ad Word works. All those "algorithms" (that's quite scary - we all agreed we are definitely Humanties - strong, and quite suck at Maths). It seems the more you read, the more resources you find. They are all linked to eachother (in true SEO style) and keep on going like a premordial black hole. I stopped at http://adwords.blogspot.com - Although I know these blog posts were written by Google Employees and would be invaluable, I realised there was about 10 years worth of reading available there and it was all too much for my poor brain to handle.

I was browsing About.com and have learnt a little more about the Content Network. Here's what happened when I searched for Health Club:



So, it's all our competition! Brint it ON. Natasha said the winning team in 2008 received negative feedback about not using negative keywords, or capitalising on the Content Network. I don't blame them - its just more work to figure out how to use them! But, we'll be making sure we don't repeat their mistakes. Some ideas came to mind on what *kind* of content we could advertise under:
- Fitness
- Workouts
- Lose Weight
- Postnatal Exercise
etc. etc. etc. Some of it is extremely broad and hence will attract a high CTR, but at the same time we want to be up there stealing our competitions's prospects :) I personally think their ad text is slightly poor, and wasn't written by a Direct Marketing Expert. We can do better. Maybe "March Madness" by Fitness First.. meh, yeah, Special Offer, Call To Action. But they are a mass produced, service-lacking giant and the only thing going for them is the multiple locations and lines of fancy exercise machines. They do not have any client retention strategies - just "piss clients off" and "harrass prospects by phone" strategies.

I am feeling more confident by the minute..

The challenge now begins!

HELLLLLLLLO

Welcome to our blog once again, back for more huh? I will introduce myself before I start blogging about our challenge. My name is Natasha and I am currently a 2nd year student at ECU, majoring in journalism and PR. Studying journalism and PR but competing in a marketing challenge? Hmmm. Well I wanted to compete in this challenge because first of all it is a challenge, I really did not want to do the other assignments (boring) and I knew I would learn so much from this and gain some great experience (helllo resume). I also forgot to mention that I am the team leader for our group which, is very intimidating since I'm not the leading type but again it's another challenge for me and I know I will learn a lot from it. Wow, I am saying challenge a lot! Anyways after meeting our client on Wednesday our group met for our weekly meeting at uni Thursday afternoon. While working on our client profile, we realised that finding certain keywords for our adword was going to be difficult because our client now caters to men not just women. With everyone's ideas and thoughts about our client I will now be putting the client overview together for the pre-campagin strategy.
Below is just a few key points that we will be using in our client overview.

Client Profile
*Currently a women's health club which has been open for 3 years
*14 staff members
*Stress relief environment
*Community feel environment
*No longer a women's only club
*A club where they take care of you and want you to achieve your goals

Client's Objectives
*Target Western Suburbs
*Increase stakehold
*Increase membership intake
*Promote their new co-ed expansion
*Online purchasing
*Awareness of the clubs community environment

Market Analysis
*White collar customers
*Competitors
- Next Generation, Kings Park
- Fitness First, Subiaco
- Healthy Life, Cottesloe


Current Marketing
*10% advertising online, 90% offline
*Direct mail
*Emails to customers
*Personal selling at shopping centres near the club
*Small signs on the main road situated near the club
*Customer Service is very important, different from the bigger gyms
*Weaknesses are that the website is information filled and lacks involvement


Our meeting was helpful and we came up with a lot of information for our client profile but that doesn't mean it was easy. Two lovely middle aged ladies who were sitting next to us in another QUIET study room apparently thought we were interested in what they were talking about. Talking so loud in a quiet study room should not be tolerated and while our group was talking louder than a whisper, the ladies next to us were far more annoying (I could use another word). So when a library person (really didn't know who he was) came into our room and told US to be quiet, lets just say we weren't that very happy. The fact that this man stood around the rooms and more than likely heard these ladies talk and did nothing was shocking. Old-er (hehe) students are just as loud as us younger students but noooo, we get told off like little children. Mr Library man, you wait till next week!!

And next week we will have finished our pre-campaign strategy for our client and will be anticipating his feedback. So our tasks for this weekend is to individually work on our proposed adwords strategy and send each other our ideas. Calli and I are meeting up on Tuesday to put it all together because Sarah is very busy at the moment. Sarah will be posting a blog hopefully soon, since her laptop unfortunatley crashed.
Enough of me rambling, PHOTO TIME! Thanks for checking out our blog, come back soon for more on our adventure during this CHALLENGE and to see what happens to Mr. Library!



Moi, Calli & Sarah before our marketing class









Myself, Calli & Sarah at Verve For Women, our client.

The First Meeting

Hi there. If you're reading this, you've somehow stumbled across the Google Online Marketing Challenge blog of Natasha, Sarah and Calli, 2nd years Public Relations students at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Maybe you meant to visit, maybe you're lost. ;) Howevever, Thank You for visiting our blog, and we hope you enjoy our posts!

When originally posed with the option of taking part in the Google Online Marketing Challenge, I did what many people would immediately do - I thought "That's too much work, requires too much thinking, and I don't have the patience." Then I remembered why I'm at uni, in the first place.I'm studying a Bachelor of Business, majoring in Marketing and PR, and I currently work full-time at a Fitness Marketing Company which mainly advertises through direct and online marketing. I adore the online culture, and I've been designing websites for over 10 years. I love a challenge. I want a job in the future which deals with the internet and marketing online. Now it's turned into, WHY NOT?!

My team members Natasha and Sarah, and I, met last Thursday to discuss. We had to firstly consider who we would choose to market, keeping in mind some important criteria:

• Small busines
• Local area
• Niche market, specified targeting
• Minimal competition
  

We've chosen one of my VIP clients at work, Verve Health Club in one of Perth's most affluent suburbs. We had a great brainstorming session about what kinds of Ad Groups we can create, the associated keywords, Ad wording, and most importantly, how to optimise our ads and make them as "specific and granular" as possible. We came up with some great campaign ideas. As I already have a good understanding of marketing concepts like "Unique Selling Point" and
"Call To Action", writing copy will be even easier. We've written 3 pages of meeting minutes, including one whole page of "To-Do"s for this week.

I emailed our client the appropriate letter, and we had our first REAL challenge. Verve, who currently is a Womens-Only Health Club, is opening their doors to men on April 1st. So our selling point of "womens only" is all but gone. We'll now have double the market to attract, but we'll have to play smarter to formulate our targeted ads.

Our Pre Campaign-Strategy is due Thursday, 2nd April. Today we have our meeting with Verve Health Club, where we can and formulate our campaign goals and strategy. At our meeting tomorrow, we'll use this information to create our strategy. To do this effecively, we're going to read the hell out of all of the user guides, tip sheets and other Google Online Marketing resources (our lecturer Peter Ling gave us two pages of links). I've just purchased the Full Disclosure Guide from GOMCHA, which on first glace looks fantastic (Now I want to write an e-book!!). I can't wait to educate myself to the brim and then have fun writing the Ads with Sarah and Natasha.

I'm the type of person who gets really passionate and stuck into things, so much that they consume my life (Sorry Rob). I guess this challenge kind of attracts people like that.

Here's a photo of myself at Duckstein Brewery in the Swan Valley, with a beer in true uni student style. I'll let the the girls post their pics.

Signing out for now,

-- Calli