Transcript
Page 1: Google AdWords Post-Campaign Report

Texas Rock Gym Google Online Marketing Challenge

Grace Goetze Amber Chang Blake Wade

Jeffrey Beseda Michael Jones

Will Allen

Page 2: Google AdWords Post-Campaign Report

1. Executive Summary

Campaign Overview

Since 1996, Texas Rock Gym has been serving the Houston area as a provider of

indoor recreation and fitness. To increase sales and revenue for the business, a Google

AdWords Campaign. The four campaigns that were created at the beginning of the time

period were Parties and Groups, Healthy Living, Family Activities and Brand. At the

beginning of the campaign period, the budget was divided evenly between the three

weeks of the project with $83.33 for each week. As the competition period went on, the

budget was adjusted to accommodate for changes to the campaigns. Ads were tested to

determine CTR, how often they were being shown and position on the page, and changes

were made to improve these numbers. Geo-targeting was used to reach customers in

Houston and the surrounding areas. Campaign goals included achieving 10,000

impressions and having a CTR of 1.5%. The ultimate goal is to increase visitors to the

website which will lead to more first time customers and more people booking events. In

addition, we would like to see more people visiting the physical location. Online booking

is available for parties and events as well as the after school program at the rock climbing

gym. For individual climbers, online waiver registration is available but payments must

be made at the physical location.

Key Results

Initially, we began with four campaigns: Parties and Groups, Healthy Living,

Family Activities and Brand. We ended up stopping the Brand campaign entirely

partway through the campaign, because no impressions were being made for the

campaign. Our Healthy Living campaign was most successful in terms of CTR at 4.33%

as well as the lowest average CPC at $0.50. The lowest CTR for our campaigns was the

Parties and Groups campaign with 1.13%. Excluding the stopped Brand campaign, the

Healthy Living campaign had the fewest number of ad groups but did the best overall.

Future Online Marketing Recommendations

Looking forward, we have certain recommendations for our client to implement.

We first recommend that Texas Rock Gym continue to utilize AdWords but on a larger

scale. With a larger budget and more diversification of different campaigns, the reach can

expand and grow the traffic even further. Some of the more successful ad groups used in

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our campaign can serve as a starting place for our client to develop campaigns of their

own. Additionally, sticking with the geo-targeting strategies we implemented would

benefit Texas Rock Gym. To go along with an increased budget for AdWords, they

should include some online only promotions. These promotions would help make the ads

more desirable to those searching and would help drive traffic to the site. They should

also implement SEO on their webpage in order to best capture search traffic. Another

area to explore further would be social media, our recommendation is to introduce an

Instagram account. This Instagram account would allow them to highlight different areas

of their gym through pictures and short videos. This in turn could drive traffic to their

website and their physical location.

2. Industry Component Campaign Overview

Major Campaign Goals and Initial Strategies

Our initial campaign goals were 10,000 impressions over the three weeks as well

as have a CTR of 1.5%. The overall goal of the campaign was to increase visitor traffic to

the website which will drive first time customers. In addition, the increase of visitors to

the website will lead to an increase in events and after school programs being booked

online. Because Google AdWords was relatively new to our group, our initial strategy to

approach these goals was to create campaigns, groups, and keywords and leave it

untouched for a week, then re-strategize based on the first week’s results.

Operational Details

At the beginning of the campaign period, the budget was divided evenly between

the three weeks with the expectation that adjustments would need to be made. This

resulted in a budget of $83.33 per week, which was then to be split between the four

campaigns. The total amount of money spent over the campaign was 248.66. Broken

down by campaign, this is $57.69 for Healthy Living, $91.70 for Family Activities,

$99.27 for Parties and Groups, and none for Brand. One of the first major changes that

we made was to pause the Brand campaign. In the first week of the campaign, there was

not a single impression or click. Since this campaign was performing quite poorly, the

decision was made by the group to remove funding from that area and focus on the

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campaigns that were showing more positive signs in terms of impressions, clicks, and

click through rate.

As far as the budget is concerned, changes were made on different dates to help

increase exposure and the likelihood of clicks. Until the date of April 2nd we had the

campaign running on auto bid. On that date we took the campaign off auto bid and onto

manual bid. We raised both the Parties and Groups and the Family Activities

campaigns to $4.00, which was just around $.50 higher than the auto bid. We also raised

the budget for Healthy Living to $3.00. This increase in bid provided the steady growth

in clicks in the campaign. After a decline set in from April 6th to April 7th, we raised the

budget of each of the three previous mentioned groups an additional dollar to put them at

$5, $5, and $4 respectively. This action paired with some tweaking of the ads themselves

helped cause the steeper incline seen in the below graph. As the last day approached we

had some money to spend and raised all of our budgets to $10.00. This gave us the last

little jump that is illustrated below.

Evolution of Campaign Strategy

At the beginning of the campaign, our group opted to use automated pricing and

to only use the Search Network instead of the Display Network. We added geo-targets on

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April 2 to narrow down our geographic location for the search. We also changed the

pricing for all the campaigns from automatic to manual at this time. We kept adjusting

the budget manually periodically for a few reasons. The first reason is to maximize the

use of our budget. Second, we adjusted the budget in order to increase exposure for the

campaigns that were doing well. The third reason for this was to work to improve the

position of where the ads were shown on the page.

One of the major changes we made was to cease the Brand campaign. We paused

the Brand campaign on March 31, because after a week of having it active, it had zero

impressions and therefore, zero percent CTR. Other major changes included editing

initial keywords on March 28th to stop the decline in impressions. This strategy was

successful and the campaign continued on an upward trend. The peak at April 4th was

brought about by creating several new adds, upping the budgets as mentioned earlier, and

fine tuning the geographic area we were targeting. The success from this push was short

lived as a small decline in impressions occurred. The remaining growth in the campaign

came mainly as a result of raising the budget per campaign, which ultimately concluded

with us maxing out the bid price for our ads. With these major changes and shifts in our

strategy we were able to run a successful campaign as summarized in the section below.

Key Results

Overall, the campaigns did very well. The overall CTR was 1.44%, which was

close to the goal that we set before the campaign began. We nearly tripled the number of

impressions that we had set as a goal.

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Our most successful campaign in terms of CTR was the Healthy Living

campaign. It had a CTR of 4.33% and also had the lowest average cost per click out of all

the campaigns at $0.50. The lowest CTR of any of our campaigns was Parties and

Groups with 1.13%. This was likely due to the fact that the average position was 4.8. We

struggled with this campaign and bringing that position lower.

The initial campaign was performing decently however we saw improvements

when changes were made. These changes such as adding ads that better targeted the

consumer and adding keywords that were more aligned with the ads lead to an increase in

performance. We did notice that a number of our keywords were very expensive and so

to combat this issue we tried to find different keywords that would fit our ads and would

come with a lower cost. As our group learned the science behind Google AdWords and

how to manage the performance, our campaigns continually improved. There were times

when our numbers dipped a bit but the campaign overall had an upward sloping trend.

Success Stories

When reviewing our AdWords campaign, we were happy to find a few areas

where we were able to improve our efficiency. First, we looked at our current keywords

and added more based on how our current ones were performing. One of the most

successful keywords we added was the long tail phrase “Rock climbing gyms in

Houston.” This particular phrase generated an overall click-through rate (CTR) of 25%.

Another addition we made after letting the campaign run for a couple of weeks, was our

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revision to our geotargeting settings. These revisions included the addition of six cities

and a county that contained multiple small towns. Our geotargeting alterations led to

some improved CTRs of up to 50% in some areas. This trend can be observed in the

above graph.

Failures

Our Brand campaign was simply not getting the clicks that other campaigns were

due to the fact that there were virtually no impressions either. For this reason we decided

to drop this campaign and focus our resources on the other three.

Conclusions

One of the biggest takeaways from this project was the need to manage costs per

clicks and keywords frequently. In order for the ads to perform well and achieve high

CTRs, key words must be effectively matched with ads. The highest performing

campaign was Healthy Living with a CTR of 4.33% so this campaign should be

continued in the future. When there are campaigns that have high costs for each keyword,

these ad groups must be monitored closely to manage costs and keep position high. This

was an issue that was encountered and challenged the team during this project. Along

with this, we have concluded the high importance of relevant, timely ads.

Future Recommendations

Our team would recommend that Texas Rock Gym continue to use Google

AdWords in their marketing efforts. Through this campaign, we have been able to not

only show the value of this tool to the client but also educate them on how to manage

their campaigns. Additionally we have provided them with the knowledge they need

about keywords that are impactful or not and the metrics that they should be expecting in

terms of CTR, CPC and average position. Geo-targeting will also be a beneficial tool for

them to ensure that they are marketing to their key customers. We also recommend to

them that they utilize SEO for their website in order to take full advantage of organic

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search traffic. Lastly we recommend that they continue and grow their current use of

social media. They currently have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a Google+ page

and we suggest that they implement an Instagram account as well.

3. Learning Component

Learning Objectives and Outcomes

We understand how vital it is to embrace the digital world that we live in. Our

team viewed the GOMC as a great opportunity to gain hands-on experience while

providing our client with marketing guidance that would be beneficial for their company.

Our goals were to gain a better understanding on how to choose appropriate keywords to

implement in our campaign as well as be able to set and manage our budget and

campaign goals. We also hoped to learn how to maximize click through rates and manage

costs-per-click. By achieving these goals it would enable us to apply our knowledge to

produce useful insights for our client while ultimately increasing their ROI. As a whole,

we came out with a greater understanding of the Google AdWords Platform and how to

maximize the results from campaigns. One of the biggest outcomes from this campaign

was all of us understanding the complexity of online marketing but the importance it

plays and will continue to play in our lives. Before this competition, we all

underestimated the skill it takes to successfully implement Google AdWords and did not

expect to learn so much from this project. We expected to be challenged in our

knowledge of online marketing but we were pleasantly surprised to be taken out of our

comfort zone and gain understanding about a vital piece of today’s online world.

Group Dynamics

Each member of our team worked to overcome obstacles so that we could come

together and succeed. We had a set of diverse yet complementary skills among the group

that allowed us to effectively collaborate our knowledge in online marketing and apply it

to our campaigns. To begin, our team met to figure out what direction to take and what

campaign groups to implement that would reach the goals we set out to achieve. We

chose one team member as our point-of-contact for our client who would constantly

ensure the goals we had set for the campaigns aligned with our goals. Each member

monitored the clicks, impressions, CPC, CTC, and budget to make sure our results were

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improving. Since each team member was monitoring the campaign, an unexpected

challenge we experienced was being able to manage our different schedules and address

any issues as a group. To combat this, we made sure we stayed in communication with

one another while also trusting that individual decision would be in the best interest of

our goals. Services such as Google Drive and GroupMe helped us communicate and stay

up to date even when we could not physically meet. We were all able to learn from each

other and rely on the strengths of others in order to complete this campaign.

Client Dynamics

Our client was very willing to work with us and give us the information and

feedback that we needed to properly conduct our campaigns. We expected that our client

wouldn’t be very familiar with Google AdWords and how campaigns are implemented

and run. This was true and we worked to update and explain to our client what we were

doing periodically along the way. Our client was very accepting of all that Google

AdWords can do and is looking forward to utilizing this tool in the future.

Future recommendations

Looking back, there were certainly steps or directions that we could have taken in

order to improve multiple components. In regards to the strategy of the campaign, each

individual ad group could have been fine tuned if we had the time and could build off of

what we achieved so far. Deeper analysis of successful pairings would be beneficial. On

the whole we feel we were able to do an exemplary job on this but there is always room

to improve. In terms of the learning experience, much of what we learned came through

trial and error. Gaining more background information about both the Google AdWords

platform and what makes a successful ad may have better prepared us. Even with trial

and error we were able to quickly learn what worked and what did not. With group

dynamics, we were quite pleased how well the team was able to work together. The

struggles faced were mainly scheduling conflicts due to the large group. With a group of

six, finding time when each member of the group could meet was difficult. Additionally,

communicating a united vision on how we wanted the campaign to run was challenging.

With six people having access to the campaign with different ideas about how it should

be run the campaign could have easily gone off track and failed. We were able to work as

a team to set some goals for each other and run a united campaign.


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