Executive Summary

Campaign overview

The 2 main goals were creating awareness for the E-commerce Me And Maria and establishing a certain

position in the minds of the (potential) customers. The other goal was to increase sales by advertising in

the Google Search Network. We divided our budget in 2 parts; one part for the ads in the Search Network

and the other part was for the banners in the Display Network. We first had the idea to work with a fixed

amount per day, but abandoned this play quickly and started to revise the budget on an almost daily

basis.

Evolution of your campaign strategy

Over the course of our campaign we made several adjustments in order to adapt to the results we were

getting. We eliminated poorly working keywords, adjusted our daily budget several times and tried to

figure out a way to get more impressions and thus more awareness for Me and Maria. To do this we

ended up getting our display ads served in some relevant site categories. The results of this were very

satisfactory, but because we noticed our display budget was set a bit too high we ended up lowering the

daily display ad budget and our cost per click bids for those ads. Lastly we ended up adding several

keywords based on Google’s suggestion. This gave us several more well-scoring keywords we maybe

would not have considered otherwise.

Key results

In all our campaign resulted in 620 clicks and 158.220 impressions. In terms of awareness we think we

can be quite happy with those results. Of our ad groups the ‘dresses’ ad group generated most clicks

(267 clicks), followed by the ‘general’ ad group (195 clicks) and the ‘wedding dresses’ ad group (41

clicks). Unfortunately we did not get accurate conversion numbers because Kaat did not have the Google

Analytics tracking code for this implemented on her pages. We do know that in the 2 weeks of ads the

majority of visitors (80%) checking out meandmaria.be were new visitors.

Conclusion

The most important things we can say is that Adwords should be combined with Google Analytics. The

next tip is that it’s not necessary to allocate too much budget on keywords, better start small and work

your way up from there.

Future recommendations

We recommend Kaat to continue with Google Adwords . If Adwords is combined correctly with Analytics it

can provide useful information as to the structure, content and set-up of the website. Apart from that we

also advise her to redesign her 404 pages so they don’t confuse astray visitors. Setting up a Google+

page might give her even more traffic, clicks and conversions coming from social sources. Other than that

a lot can be gained from common sense: see what works and what doesn't. Try and find out why and

adjust accordingly.

Industry Component

1. Campaign overview:

1.1 Campaign goals

Review the major campaign goals (strategic goals as well as metrics: CTR, CPC, Impressions,

etc.) set prior to the project and discuss your general strategies for approaching each goal.

The first goal of our campaign was to create awareness, since Me and Maria is a small

webshop that is not yet very known. We wanted to create awareness by advertising on the

Google Display Network. This way, people would learn about Me and Maria and consider it as

one of their options to buy new vintage clothing. We tried to reach this by appearing on relevant

sites (by keyword targeting) and so being top-of-mind with potential customers. The use of

display ads seemed the best solution for our audience.

The second goal of our campaign was to increase sales by advertising on Google Search. To

increase our chances to show our ads to the most suited customers, we chose the right

keywords and targeted on language and location.

To maintain structure in our campaign we clustered our different Ad groups by product category:

dresses (one general and one for display ads), wedding dresses, tops and one general cluster.

We only targeted women between the ages of 16 - 35 years who live in the Flemish part of

Belgium.

1.2 Operational details

(campaign dates, money spent, ad groups used): Review the basic schedule and cost structure

you followed, your methods for monitoring the account, etc.

We started our campaign on May 29th and finished it on June 8th. The total allocated budget

($250) was spent. As indicated in the pre-campaign report, we wanted to work with a fixed

amount per day ($17,8 dollar per day, since we were planning to run our campaign for 14 days),

but during the campaign, we decided to increase or decrease our budget per day, depending on

the results. We also decided to create two different budgets: one for the general ads, and one

for the display ads. To use our budget more efficiently, we interrupted keywords and ads that

didn’t work well, so our budget was used for ads and keywords that performed well.

2. Evolution of Your Campaign Strategy:

2.1 What were the major changes you made during the campaign and what led to these

changes?

Our biggest changes primarily involved adjusting the daily budget. The first day of the campaign

we only used a small part of the assigned budget for that day. The second day our account was

under review by Google and thus all ads and spending were momentarily frozen. While trying to

figure out what caused our ads to be temporarily pulled, we tinkered with some of our ads. We

noticed some small typos in some of them and also saw some of them had a link to a non-

existent page in the description. The target URL of those ads led to a valid page, but to avoid

frustration for users who copied the link rather than clicking it, we changed those URLs to

existing pages. Because the display ads weren’t generating a lot of views, we decided to

investigate and see what we could do about it. When we suggested a number of site categories

for our display ads to appear on, such as online women’s clothing, our display ad impressions

surged.

However with this steep increase also came a huge increase in spending on the third day of our

campaign. That same day we discovered our total daily budget was actually twice as much as

we had anticipated. Up until then we didn’t know the display ads and the text ads did not share

the same budget. We decided to refrain from intervening initially to see the impact the increased

success of our display ads was having but had to adjust shortly after or we would have burned

our budget much faster than originally planned. Rather than 20 euro a day for each sub

campaign, we decided to set the bar at 10 euro daily. Shortly afterwards we implemented a

fairly large number of new keywords based on suggestions provided by Google. This resulted in

quite a few more clicks.

Nearing the end of the campaign we had to adjust the budget again to properly spread out the

remaining amount of money over the last few days. We toned our budget down to 7,5 euro a

day for both the text ads and the display ads and were very content to see our clicks were

barely affected by this decrease in spending.

On June 6th, we changed the status of some keywords (vintage trouwkleed, vintage kleren,

retro webshop, vintage webshops, jurken online kopen, fifties kleedje,). The whole ad group

‘tops’ and some display ads that didn’t work well were set from active to interrupted, to use the

remaining budget more efficiently for keywords and ads that did perform well.

2.2 How did these changes affect your campaign?

The result was that we had even more clicks even though we had lowered the budget. Our

keywords were more effective. The result of these 2 big changes was that we had more clicks

and a better ranking on the result page.

3. Key Results

3.1 Overall performance of the campaign and individual ad groups

Fig 1: Key Campaign results

In total, our campaign generated 620 clicks and 158.220 impressions. The ‘dresses’ ad group

generated most clicks (267 clicks), followed by the ‘general’ ad group (195 clicks) and the

‘wedding dresses’ ad group (41 clicks). The ‘tops’ ad group only generated 3 clicks, so we

decided to stop this ad group.

The effect of impressions are hard to measure. An indicator can be the increase of organic

search or direct traffic. Organic search showed an increase from 439 before the campaign to

1279 (58,64 % new visitors) visits during the campaign.. 47% used the brand name in their

search. Direct traffic went from 157 to 470 during the campaign with 80,43 % new visitors.

We don’t have the exact sales figures, but according to Kaat (from Me and Maria), there’s no

significant difference in sales with the previous period (before our campaign). In the weekend

where she gave a discount of 20% (in honor of the first birthday of Me and Maria), sales went

up, but this likely has little to do with our campaign although we did implement specific ads to

further support this action. Concerning the visitors on her website, she states that most of them

came through her Facebook page, and not trough Google or Google AdWords. But most of the

visitors on her site during our campaign, were new visitors. She also got a lot of new

subscriptions to her newsletter. This may be a result of our campaign. But we can’t directly

attribute that to our campaign.

.

3.2 Performance of the initial campaign and changes in performance following your

optimization efforts

The first day of our campaign started fairly slowly because not all ads were approved yet and

our display ads weren’t being shown on many relevant sites. On the second day our account

was temporarily frozen due to a routine check by Google. We took that time to focus on stuff

that could use some improving. The first thing we did was fix some small errors in our ads, such

as written URL and small language mistakes. Afterwards we tried finding relevant placement for

our display ads, so we selected some appropriate categories for our ads to appear on. We also

considered suggesting specific sites such as select fashion blogs but because we already had

such an intense spike in impressions we opted not to.

On the third day we noticed our changes had an immense impact. Both clicks and impressions

went up explosively, but that is also when we realized our budget was set at double the rate we

had intended it to be. When we halved the budget afterwards impressions stabilized to a lower

level, but interestingly enough clicks still remained fairly high

3.3 Keyword combinations that were effective and ineffective

The most effective keyword combinations were: Me and Maria (113 clicks), retro kleding (54

clicks), vintage jurken (35 clicks), online jurken (31 clicks), retro jurken (29 clicks), Zalando (26

clicks) and vintage kleding (22 clicks).

The most ineffective keyword combinations (all of them didn’t even generate a single click)

were: jurken online kopen, fifties kleedje, lange jurken online, vintage kleren, retro webshop,

vintage webshops, vintage kleding dames, vintage kleding vrouwen, retro kleding dames, hippe

jurken, vintage trouwkleed. Most of these ads were interrupted, to focus on the more efficient

ads.

3.4 Your success stories and quick, but clear references to your failures

In the beginning we used keywords that were not specific enough and because of that not

relevant enough for the people we wanted to target. For example ‘jurken online kopen’ and

‘lange jurken online’. We learned quick enough and interrupted these keywords. On the third

day we realized our daily budget was in fact twice what we had intended it to be, so we had to

adjust accordingly to manage our budget wisely. Adding a number of keywords suggested by

Google greatly helped in getting quality traffic to MAM and suggesting a number of relevant

sites for our display ad network caused our number of impressions to explode when compared

to the day before. In the end we generated close to 160.000 impressions, which leads us to

believe we did manage to succeed in our goal of raising awareness for Me and Maria. The

owner stated that the bulk of visitors during the time we ran our campaign were people who had

previously never visited the site before.

Fig 2: Even though our budget was diminished clicks remained solid

4. Conclusions

The Google Online Marketing challenge was ultimately an excellent experience to get

familiarized with Google’s array of tools for search engine marketing. We ended up learning a

lot about the importance of budgets, keywords and timing in order to optimize campaign results.

Our main goal for Me and Maria was to raise awareness for Kaat’s sprouting business and I

think we did succeed in accomplishing this goal. We think 158.000 impressions over the course

of less than two weeks is certain to raise awareness. Unfortunately we did not have the

foresight to integrate both the site and our campaign fully with Google Analytics in order to get

accurate conversion numbers and other helpful stats. This is something we will be sure to avoid

in the future.

Other than that our interaction with the site owner was always pleasant and we hope she has

seen the merits of promoting her site with AdWords. Since certain traffic spikes in her site traffic

were from Facebook, it may be worth considering opening up a Google+ profile page to further

take advantage of the vast amount of visitors social network sites can generate.

5. Future Recommendations

We advise Me and Maria to improve the implementation of Google Analytics. MAM will learn

better how users interact with her website and maximize conversions.

The first step is to enable e-commerce reporting in the Analytics account. (Profile settings >

Main website profile information > Edit > E-commerce website: yes.

The second step is to make sure that the Google Analytics tracking code is on the top of the

code of your receipt page (= thanks for your order page).

The third and last step is to add an extra e-commerce code, also in the receipt page.

Apart from these suggestions we also recommend that she changes the layout of her 404

pages. As it stands, a visitor ending up on one of those gets a very confusing page featuring an

empty banner and a random product priced €0,00 . We discovered this when we noticed one of

our ads contained a text url that led to one such error page. Seeing as she gets so much traffic

from social sources, it might also merit looking into getting a Google+ profile page for her web

shop. During the birthday discount action people were very eager to share this content with their

friends and this generated a massive spike in traffic.

Our team also thinks that Me and Maria should keep advertising on Google Adwords. Especially

the Google Display Banners with an image ad increased awareness and makes immediately

clear what Me and Maria stands for. This together with a limited budget for advertising about

actions, promotions or new collections which will help increase sales.

Learning component

Learning objectives and outcomes

Over the course of our education to attain the postgraduate Digital Marketing and

Communication at EHSAL Management School we had to complete a sizable number of

projects relating to the field. All of these assignments had us use the theory seen in the lessons

and apply it to real world projects.

While these projects presented a satisfying way to test what we had learned, we never had the

opportunity to do a project that required us to actually tinker with search engine marketing tools.

Seeing as SEM is a very big part of today's digital advertising landscape, we applied for the

Google Online Marketing Challenge. Our most important learning objective was to learn/ work

about/with Google Adwords. The way we figured, this competition presented us with the ideal

way to make up for the lack of real world experience with Adwords and prepare us for the job

market a lot better.

The first few days were the most confusing. On the second day our ads were put offline by

Google so that our account could be reviewed. We used this time to check out all the different

options Google Adwords has to offer. During this time we found out that it was best to suggest

certain type of website to put our banners on.

We’ve also had some difficulty with the budget; in the first week we had put a max CPC that

was too high. We were under the assumption that our total daily budget was capped at 20 euro

a day. However, since text ads and display ads count as separate budgets, our real daily total

was in fact set at 40 euro. After that, we’ve reacted much quicker to the number of visits and

clicks and adapted our CPC every 2 days. We were very surprised to see that even if we

lowered the CPC, that our ads were still getting a good CTR and clicks. We also noticed that it’s

not always necessary to bid on expensive key words, a lot of our cheaper, alternative key words

got a good number of impressions, CTR and position on the result page.

One of the things we didn’t expect was how difficult it was to put an effective message and call

to action to satisfy a certain need in just 70 characters. We’ve launched multiple ads for the

same product and after a while we’ve discontinued the ads that were performing less.

Group dynamics

The biggest challenge we were faced with was actually the start of the campaign. We had some

problems with the budget; we lost a couple of days by trying to make out a good budget and

CPC system. But once we got the hang of it, it went much smoother. One other issue was the

follow up of the campaign. We just started working at our new internships so it was a bit difficult

to regularly check upon the daily results, but after a while we worked out a schedule where one

person does the follow up for 2 days and reports to the rest of the team and then it’s somebody

else’s turn. It made it much easier to handle the results and react much quicker to (unexpected)

events. But other than that, the group functioned very well.

Client dynamics

The cooperation with the client went ok, there weren’t much problems during the campaign. The

only thing that could’ve gone better was the discount action. We didn’t receive the correct

amount of information on time so it was a bit hard for the team to fully use this discount action to

our full advantage.

When the campaign was fully rolling we started thinking about integrating the results with the

Google Analytics for meandmaria.be. Kaat gave us access to view the analytics, but because

we did not have admin access and Kaat did not have tracking code on her web pages we

realized we were now unable to accurately track conversion. It would’ve been fun to see the

amount of conversion obtained thanks to the AdWords campaign, but neither party is to blame

here.

Future recommendations

In order to improve the campaign in the future, we would install Google Analytics in a much

earlier state and check the results more often with the client. We would also expand the

preliminary study of the client, company and challenge and fine tune the strategy. Now that we

know how the budgeting works with Google AdWords we will implement this more the strategy

and KPI’s instead of trial & error.

In all, for us this was a very helpful learning experience. The Google Online Marketing

Challenge gave us an excellent opportunity to acquaint ourselves with the many tools and

statistics Google provides. We got to learn the strengths of the platform and what to do when

something seems wrong and how to swiftly adjust an ongoing marketing campaign in order to

optimize results. I am certain this experience will aid us in our future online marketing endeavors

and would very much recommend it to other students in similar branches. We would like to

thank Google for the quick help they offered during the competition and for organizing it in the

first place.