Google Online Marketing Challenge: Campaign Overview

After three weeks of stress, debates, learning and trials and errors, the AdWords campaign is finally over. Our results, though resulting in over 1,000 clicks leave me with a sort of bitter taste in terms of our Click-Through-Rates (just 0.22%). The reason? Our graphs show we could have done better with our last week even having a CTR of 1.83%.

Of course every end is a chance for reflection, so here it goes: What could we have done different? Probably many things that I will discuss in some future posts. Before I do that, let me introduce you to my team and our project.

We are a group of six international students studying Marketing Science at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. My team is not particularly Internet savvy and online marketing is a topic we preach, yet seldom practice. Don’t get me wrong, we think it is a great tool, but there is also a difference between theory and practice. I am the only person running a blog, and apparently seem to be the designated Internet geek of the group because I have a Facebook, Twitter, Hyves, DeviantArt and Slideshare profile and know about SEO, page ranks, and analytics.

Thus, learning how to use AdWords was for most a real challenge. I am not saying it was easy for me either. I had to refer to the many presentations available on the Challenge’s website to familiarize myself with the application and its functionality. Before developing the strategy, my good friend, Andreea, spent about four days trying to understand how we should structure the campaign, use keywords, define ad groups and so on. And even then we were still unsure if it would all work out for the best.

Our company was Kwestievanlef, a local concept store based in Nijmegen that focuses on producing cool designs for t-shirts, hoodies, sweaters for men and women, as well as kids and even babies. The company was founded just in 2008 and has been constantly growing. Although the website has a fresh look to it, we soon realized that the AdWords campaign for this type of company will be rather difficult as the competition for the keywords describing the main products is rather fierce, and the expected CTR per keywords was usually at just .30%.

The challenge was not just a matter of learning how to use AdWords, but also learning how to constantly improve our campaigns, understanding when we were doing something wrong and why. The competition weeks were filled with challenges: from finding relevant (yet uncompetitive keywords) to improving our landing page quality or creating relevant ads. I will try to share with you our little adventure in the hope that you might find it useful. If you have also went through something similar, feel free to share. It would feel great to know we are not alone.