Executive Summary. Campaign Overview.

Our Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC) team partnered with The Student Bookstore, a small business located near The Pennsylvania State University in State College, Pennsylvania that provides textbooks, apparel, and gifts, to run a 21-day Google AdWords PPC campaign. Our goals were to increase traffic to the apparel and gifts sections of the website and deliver post-campaign AdWords recommendations to The Student Bookstore. Our team wanted to achieve 28,000 impressions, 800 clicks, and a CTR of 3% assuming an average CPC of $0.30. Operation details include: Monitoring 15 campaigns, including desktop, mobile, tablet, and display, and 27 Ad Groups. Our 15 campaigns evolved down to 3 campaigns that proved to be the most successful. Individual team members monitored the account daily and used ad copy A/B testing, location testing, keyword opportunities, and monitored budget. Our weekly budget spent is shown in Figure 1.1. Our $250 budget was initially broken up evenly across all campaigns, but was soon adjusted as the campaign progressed. Key Results. For the duration of the challenge, our ads received 136 clicks and 4,445 impressions for a CTR of 3.06%. Our average CPC was $1.83 and we spent exactly $249.29. The Penn State Hoody campaign had the highest CTR of 7.20%, followed by Womens Apparel Desktop campaign, which the Penn State Hoody campaign was derived from, with a CTR of 4.08%. Conclusion and Future Online Marketing Recommendations. The Student Bookstore did not generate the impressions or clicks that we had set as a goal. We did, however, generate a total CTR of 3.06% concluding our 21-day campaign. The AdWords campaign for the business was successful in positioning the businesss name and advertisements in the top three positions. For this reason, we believe it would be beneficial for The Student Bookstore to continue to use AdWords. We are unclear if our campaign was successful in increasing sales because we did not have access to conversions in Google Analytics. The Student Bookstore can improve their future AdWords campaign with the following recommendations: Remodel website for better structure, flow, and easy access Establish Merchant Center to streamline metric tracking abilities Enable conversions on website and within Google Analytics Have a strong message in social media sphere by implementing Google +. Focus Google AdWords campaigns on apparel only Keep CPC high to ensure top positions over competitors Must
Figure 1.1

Weekly Budget Spent

$17.89 Week 1 Week 2 Week 3

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Industry Component. Campaign Overview: The Student Bookstore indicated that they would like to see an increase in sales of apparel and gifts online due to the fact that many of their online sales come from textbooks. Therefore, we focused all of our campaigns on mens, womens, and childrens apparel, as well as gifts. We used the upcoming spring semester graduation in May as an opportunity to advertise for searches of The Student Bookstores gifts. Likewise, a spring Penn State football weekend was scheduled to take place close to the end of our campaign and it was an opportunity to advertise merchandise. Our metrics goals were: 28,000 impressions, 800 clicks, and a 3.0% CTR assuming an average CPC of $0.30. Our pre-campaign strategy to reach those goals was to increase quality score by using tactics such as creating new landing pages, selecting locations from Google Analytics that had promise to bring in search traffic, and creating strong ad copy. All campaigns were geo-targeted to areas in Pennsylvania, USA, such as State College, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Our keyword strategy was to focus on long tail keywords, such as womens penn state alumni t-shirt. Our team also did research using keyword tools such as, SpyFu and the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to discover additional relevant keywords, such as +penn state merchandise and penn state clothing, and ad copy used by competitors in PPC advertising. Our team used Sitelink Extensions as well, such as, Penn State Ladies Tank Tops, Penn State Ladies Sweatshirts, etc., to cover more space on the search page and give the searcher more options to links that would lead them to the websites landing pages. Our campaign launched from March 25, 2013 to April 14, 2013. This is a time frame when many people are looking to purchase graduation gowns and gifts, which are popular items at The Student Bookstore. It is also a time frame when many people are in search of Penn State Apparel for Blue White Weekend, (a spring football weekend). We ran desktop, mobile, tablet, and content campaigns, but paused all campaigns that were not desktop, except Mens Apparel Mobile, due to the fact that desktop was performing the best in terms of clicks and CTR. Initially, we divided up the budget evenly across all campaigns. After discovering what campaigns were performing best, we increased funding to these campaigns. Our strategy and budget adapted in response to campaign performance. Each team member was responsible for monitoring several similar campaigns. All three team members, however, collaborated over decisions made throughout all campaigns. We checked our individual campaigns, as well as, the AdWords campaign as a whole every few hours; an average of 5 times a day each. We documented all changes we made to the account, collaborated about our successes and failures, and decided what could be done to make our AdWords campaign more successful. When a campaign, ad group, keyword, or ad

copy was not generating impressions or clicks, we constructed a way to make it better. If we decided that a campaign should be paused, we reallocated the budgeted funds from the paused campaign and added it to other, more successful campaigns. It was challenging to manage our budget initially because we were using costly keywords. Once we narrowed down our campaigns, however, our budget became more manageable because we had more money to work with per campaign. Evolution of Campaign Strategy. Figure 2.1: Clicks and Impressions of 21-Day Period
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Week One 3/25-3/31: During the first week of the campaign, we accumulated 960 impressions, 17 clicks, a CTR of 1.77%, and an average CPC of $1.11 by the end the first week, as shown in Figure 3.1. We spent $18.82 in total during the duration of the first week. Day 6 and Day 4 were the best performing days, but due to the lack of data for the first two days of the campaign, we could not state those days as the businesss best performing day. We knew after a few days that we immediately needed to make some changes. We added keywords to all campaigns to acquire more volume and hoped to improve our impressions and clicks. We increased our bids as well to increase our chances of showing in a higher position. Towards the end of the week we decided to pause all of the display campaigns and some of the tablet and mobile campaigns because they were not generating a lot of traffic and did not have more than 2 clicks, if any at all. We decided to add a Blue and White campaign, which was centered on selling apparel for the upcoming spring football weekend. We also A/B tested our ads and changed the ones that were not performing as well. Overall, Womens Apparel Desktop campaign was the best performer with 8 clicks, 203 impressions, and a CTR of 3.94%. Specifically within that campaign, the keyword +penn state hoody was the best performer.
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Figure 3.1
Clicks 17 CTR 1.77% CPC $1.11

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Week Two 4/1-4/7 During the second week, our campaign had achieved 2,540 impressions, 72 clicks, and a CTR of 2.83%. Our average CPC was $1.99, and we spent a total of
Figure 3.2
Impressions 2,540 Clicks 72 CTR 2.83% CPC $1.99

$142.96, as shown in Figure 3.2. Our best performing keyword was +penn state hoody with 9 clicks and a 5.77% CTR. We continued to monitor our keywords and make changes when

we felt necessary. We also continued to A/B test our ad copy in order to improve the following weeks ads. We wanted to increase our impressions and clicks, so we location targeted New York City, Washington D.C., and further expanded around Philadelphia to include a part of New Jersey. We chose to expand to these areas because they have been known to also bring in traffic according to Google Analytics. Towards the end of the week, after broadening our location targeting, we decided to pause the campaigns and keywords that were still not generating impressions or clicks and focus on our well performing ones. We created a Penn State Hoody campaign to isolate and better our well performing keyword +penn state hoody. We also increased our budgets for the remaining campaigns by adding $2.00 to Womens Apparel and $1.50 for the others due to the high cost of Womens Apparels keywords for the remainder of the week. Week Three 4/8-4/14 During the third week, our campaign had achieved 945 impressions, 47 clicks, and a CTR of 4.97%, as shown in Figure 3.3. Our average CPC was $1.86, and we spent a total of $87.51. Our best performing keyword was +penn state hoody with 16 clicks and an 8.38% CTR. Our enabled campaigns were narrowed down to include only Womens Apparel Desktop, Penn State Hoody and Mens Apparel Desktop. In hopes of keeping our clicks constant while reducing impressions, we paused all keywords that had received any number of impressions but no clicks. After doing so, our CTR slowly increased to 3.06%. Finally, we improved the ad copy and increased the budget by $1/day for Mens Apparel Desktop in hopes of improving the average positioning, but with little success. The average position continued to remain at around 4.5. Key Results. Campaign. Overall, our search campaigns did better than our display network campaigns, which had a 0% CTR. Within our search campaigns, our desktop campaigns achieved the most success; specifically our final remaining three desktop campaigns: Mens Apparel Desktop, Womens Apparel Desktop, and Penn State Hoody. By creating new
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Figure 3.3
Clicks 47 CTR 4.97% CPC $1.86

campaigns, such as the Blue and White campaign and Penn State Hoody campaign; pausing campaigns that did not do well, such as the display, tablet, and mobile campaigns; adding and changing keywords, increasing our CPC and daily budget, and adding specific location targeting, we were able to increase all of our metrics over the 21-day period. Ad Groups. Out of the 27 Ad Groups we initially created, some of our Ad Groups did not perform as well as anticipated, such as Blue and White Gear (1 click, 0.4% CTR) and Graduation (0 clicks, 0% CTR). We expected these Ad Groups to do well because they correspond with two upcoming events that would increase Penn State apparel and gift sales. Our team generated, on average, 20 keywords per Ad Group at the beginning of our campaign. The original strategy used for keyword generation was one that included analyzing both the habits of existing searchers, the content of the website, and tools like Alexa.com. This strategy allowed us to garner upper level quality scores from the start of our campaign (mostly 6/10 and above). During week 1, our team realized that we needed to implement more keywords to generate more impressions. The strategy used for this batch of keywords did not differ completely from the original strategy but was based more on the recommendations of Google AdWords itself. The recommendations we are referring to were shown on the right hand side of the Add Keywords page and were honed further by the use of Googles Keyword Tool. We started with many broad match keywords because it did not seem to have a negative effect in terms of garnering traffic with a CTR of at around 2.00% during the first week. Exact match keywords did not prove effective, except in the case of [penn state sweatpants] , which developed a 100% CTR after Week 1 with 3 impressions and 3 clicks. The result of our efforts was the addition of as many as 75 or more keywords to each Ad Group. Unfortunately, most of these new additions had 0 impressions with the most successful types being broad match modifier and phrase match keywords. Figure 4.1 shows our most successful keywords in terms of clicks, and their metrics: Figure 4.1: Best Performing Keywords in Terms of Clicks Keyword # Of Clicks CTR Avg. CPC Avg. Position +penn state store 25 7.20% $1.74 1.2 +penn state 20 3.29% $2.34 2.4 merchandise penn state 8 4.55% $1.26 3.7 clothing Conclusions. The Student Bookstore has local competition because the business is located close to The Pennsylvania State University and other Penn State apparel and gift businesses. We soon began to realize that the local competition, such as The Family Clothesline and

Lions Pride who also sell Penn State apparel and gifts, existed online with paid search. We discovered that we needed to increase our cost-per-clicks in order to outbid our local competition and achieve a higher position. After we did this, the AdWords campaign proved to be more successful and achieved more clicks because ads were mostly shown in the top three positions. Overall, the campaign increased brand awareness for The Student Bookstore. Site traffic rose slightly according to Google Analytics (5.5%), (We compared the site traffic 21 days before our campaign with the 21 days that our campaign ran and determined that site traffic rose 5.5%.) but it was not significant enough for us to state that it was due to our campaign. We also did not have access to The Student Bookstores conversions data, so we were unable to determine if their sales increased since the start of our AdWords campaign. Future Recommendations. The biggest and most extensive future recommendation our team has is the total reorganization and remodel of our clients website. The current organizational structure allows for only a handful of account structures which are not conducive to the best results. Many products on the website are redundantly listed which makes it difficult to lead those who click our ads to a specific, high quality landing page. By readjusting The Student Bookstores website, we believe they would have greater success. Second, we recommend utilizing more Google services like Merchant Center, which would allow The Student Bookstore to track conversions and really streamline their metric tracking abilities. Had our team had access to an associated Merchant Center account, we could have more accurately tracked conversions and reported more thoroughly to our client. In addition to Merchant Center, we recommend that The Student Bookstore implement a strong presence in the social media sphere. This includes services like Twitter and Google+, in addition to the Facebook page they already maintain. Social media profiles such as these could prove themselves to be a new avenue for offering online only sales and promotions. In addition, with implementation of Merchant Center, conversions through these verticals could be very easily tracked to show progress. Lastly, we strongly advise that our client continue their online marketing via Google AdWords. We believe that the benefits offered by an AdWords account will prove indispensable. If the Student Bookstore were to continue with the account where we left off, the campaign would not have to be overly extensive or complicated. As evident after we narrowed down our active campaigns to 3, the campaigns that demonstrated the most success were clearly sweatshirts (as found using the +penn state hoody keyword), the Mens Apparel campaign and Gifts. We would also recommend having a high CPC of $2 or $3 to ensure the top positions over the leading competitors.

Learning Component. Learning Objectives and Outcomes. Our teams participation in the GOMC challenge has been a great and valuable experience. We can take the knowledge and understanding from this experience and use it in our future careers or our future client relations. We also decided to get AdWords certified, which will help us further our success with AdWords. Our team set the following goals at the start of the challenge: to learn the overall structure of Google AdWords and gain real-life experience, learn budget management techniques using Google tools, and, of course, to benefit The Student Bookstore. We believe that we have, indeed, accomplished all of our set goals. Although our campaign could have performed better, we have learned the Google AdWords interface through our successes and failures. For instance, we know the success of our content campaigns was limited without a connected Google Merchant account. We learned about budgeting through use of the metric reports and the tracking located on the home page of the AdWords interface. We also believe that we have benefited The Student Bookstore. If nothing else, they now have a benchmark for which techniques are successful and which are not if they choose to continue using the account. The real-world experience has exceeded our expectations and was the best benefit of the competition. We can now share our knowledge and experience concerning Google AdWords. The major lessons learned were: to plan ahead, be proactive, utilize the tools and resources available, and to always keep improving. Having an initial strategy, regardless of how much it changed over the 21-day period, was a huge help to our success. Our success was also largely due to the tools and resources available regarding Google AdWords. The tools, such as the Keyword Tool, helped us to locate keywords that would benefit our campaigns. Google Analytics was also very helpful in determining where to location target our campaigns. Another important lesson we learned is to always keep improving. The constant monitoring and updating of our account, including A/B testing and adjusting match types, allowed us to improve every week. Group Dynamics. This experience was tremendous in the fact that we all come from different backgrounds in different fields (advertising, information sciences, and security risk analysis) and worked great as a team. The adversity we faced centered on the transition from learning about the theory of AdWords to learning by working directly with the account. We quickly learned that all the learning that we did prior to the campaign launch wasnt going to necessarily fit the structure of our account and goals of client perfectly. For example, we thought we should keep our CPCs around $0.30 so we would not go over our daily budget.

We didnt realize until starting that our market was as competitive as it was and that wed require average CPCs around $1.80 to show ads in the top three positions. We dealt with this unexpected surprise with continual communication and face-to-face meetings. Communication was very important in order to gather and share information and learn from each others experimentation. Essentially we were refining our campaigns 2-3 times as fast as we could have had we been on our own. Client Dynamics. Our team knew it was vital to select a client that was not only a small business, but also a huge part of the community. The Student Bookstore has been a staple to the downtown State College community for many years and we wanted to help them expand their great local presence to the online community. The client was very responsive to help us when we first began. We had a meeting with them to make sure we would work toward their goals. They also helped us when we wanted them to add something such as a heading to their landing pages, and they gave us access to their Google Analytics page, which was a great help. The enthusiasm, however, diminished as our work with The Student Bookstore continued. Our team wanted to implement Merchant Center and track conversions on the businesss Google Analytics site, however, The Student Bookstore was unresponsive in our requests. Without Merchant Center or a way to track sales, we still believe that we have benefitted The Student Bookstore by promoting their name in Search Engine Marketing. The ads we had created for them showed mostly in the top three positions, and we did get a significant click-through-rate overall. Future Recommendations. To improve our campaign strategy in the future, we would narrow down a focus more quickly. For example, we would not wait an entire week to pause or add new campaigns. We discovered that we performed best with desktop, so we would also focus all of our campaigns to desktop instead of using display, mobile, or tablet. As far as learning experience, having a closer relationship with our client would have helped tremendously. Although our client willingly participated in the challenge, it turns out that our client lacked the time and excitement to meet or communicate with us frequently. We wished were able to establish a stronger client relationship, as it could have been a more rewarding experience. This would be true not only for us, but also for The Student Bookstore, assuming they wish to continue experimenting running an AdWords campaign. As discussed, we felt we got the most out of meeting in person with our group members. To improve group dynamics in the future, we would meet more often than we already did, especially during the 21-day operating window. With that being said, our use of group messaging and collaborative document creation technologies did keep us all well informed.