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/