$200 Spent!

We've spent our budget!

	All time
Clicks		126
Impressions		122,483
CTR		0.10%
Avg. CPC		$1.59
Avg. CPM		$1.64
Total Cost		$200.35
Conversion Rate		57.66%
Cost per Conversion		$2.88
Total Conversions		64

As we get to the finish line

Yay, we're at 118 clicks and 59 conversions! The changes that the team made in the last week seem to have really helped improve the campaign as we've not only caught up on spending but also sped up! It looks like we'll run out of money before Friday at this pace. We're choosing to run out 1-2 days early rather than risk not spending all of the money. We also saw from the first week that most clicks happened in teh beginning of the week anyway. 

Some of the things that really helped were to understand how conversions worked and to track conversions rather than just CTR. The changes that the team made optimized keywords, and ad copy based on not just CTR but also the level and quality of conversions being made. Another thing that helped was to track the quality score of the ad and reword the ads to improve the score or make more versions of the successful ads. 

For me personally, I have to admit that I wasn't sure in the beginning how much we would really learn from a 3-week challenge. While this challenge has not made me an expert, I have a new found appreciation for search engine marketing and how complex it is. I feel more at ease with SEM and confident that I have the basics to build on. 

One thing that would have been interesting is to know how other teams are faring. While it is obvious that we are meant to improve vs. our own results, some healthy competition would have been fun. 

Campaign Progress

All of our team members are getting very involved in tracking the activity on our google ads campaign and learning the differences, subtle changes can make. For example, for some keywords that were getting high impressions but zero clicks, we categorized them for a new ad group, so a more tailored ad would show up for those keywords specifically. Since the new ad group was created yesterday, we've already seen several new clicks with the same keywords. We've also deleted and paused some of our ads that have not performed well and created new ones. Playing around with our budget and keeping a close watch on the adwords activiting has been very interesting.

I agree that managing a Google AdWord campaign is very complicated and takes a lot of maintaining. I remember having a hard time managing a google adword account for the adoption agency I worked for before the MBA program. I thought it was just because I didn't know what I was doing, but now that I've been taking a class on this subject, I'm still learning that it's not the easiest project. However, it is very effective and there seems to be no substitute for a Google AdWords campaign.

We've evaluated our keywords and CTRs after launching the campaign for a few days. It's very interesting to see what's effective and what is now. We are all looking forward to getting back together to tweak the campaign for more success.

Four Days Into The Challenge

I had no idea how complicated online advertising was until our team started working on the Google Online Marketing Challenge. I've always been on the search side of things and as such have not appreciated the strategy, nuances and planning that goes behind online advertising campaigns.

It's been a terrific learning experience so far, although my head does start to spin with all the possibilities online advertising has to offer. For our client NBIS, we came up with over 50 key words that people might search for and selection of ads to go along with certain key words. Though we tried our best to be strategic about our key word selection and ad composition, time will tell if we actually know what people are searching for and what is relevant to them.

Our campaign has been active now for four days and it will be interesting to measure our progress tomorrow at our team's first meeting since the start of the challenge. Hopefully we will have enough data to determine whether we picked good key words, whether our ads are working and whether our online strategy has improved web traffic and other selected conversion metrics for NBIS.

Off To The Races

Team NBIS is a group of MBA students participating in the Google Online Marketing Challenge. For the next 3 weeks we will be managing an AdWords campaign for the Network for Business Innovation and Sustainability (NBIS).

Today was the start of the campaign but the preparation began several weeks ago. We have been working with NBIS to identify the goals of the campaign. We then went to work designing text ads and identifying the appropriate keywords for each ad. Now we'll get to see the results of all our preparation.

Team members will be posting throughout the campaign. We hope you'll come back and read about our experience.