Friday, April 24, 2009

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

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

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

Monday, April 13, 2009

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

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

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