Campaign Report. Executive Summary

Transcription

1 Campaign Report Executive Summary Campaign overview: As part of Google Online Marketing Challenge, we decided to promote a parisian Krav Maga club through our Adwords campaign. The campaign for Krav Maga Paris has lasted 21 days ( ) and cost 195,30 ($250). This campaign had two main goals we worked together: Encourage women to practice a self-defense sport. Far from being restricted to men, Krav Maga teaches women how to react in case of an aggression. To generate awareness about Krav Maga (this combat sport is quite unknown), and about the club Krav Maga Paris. This is a really strategic time as people are looking for a new sport for September. We decided to set up 2 campaigns, one focused on the Display network and another on the Search network. The purpose was to optimize each network apart. We created 14 ad groups, each one with at least 2 ads in order to improve the results of the campaigns with A/B testing. Globally we distinguished 934 and 40 negative in the search campaign. Thanks to Google Analytics, we have been able to identify the search queries used by internet users to arrive on the website, and thus adapt our. Additionally in order to strengthen the campaign and increase contact we used ad extensions with a Google address account and added a number phone to all our ads. Key results: Globally we achieved results higher than expected except CTR which is quite low due to the Display campaign. The Search campaign achieved better results than the Display campaign. 92% of clicks came from the search campaign. There is also a high difference between CTR and CPC from both campaigns. These differences are outlined below. Objectives Planned Realized Var.% Impressions % Clicks % According to our client, the phone calls increased during the campaign s period. The Club had CTR CPC 1% $0.35 0,86% $ % -34% 30 contacts, whereas they usually have less than people including a girl participated in a free trial class by using a coupon from the website (at the same period last year, they were only 3) and then subscribed at the end of the class. Conclusion: the results of the Google AdWords campaign we conducted have greatly exceeded our objectives with a volume of clicks above our expectations (48% vs. expected) and an average CPC significantly lower than we had anticipated (-34 %). Nevertheless, the results generated by the Display Network were disappointing. The overall objective of this campaign has been fully reached with an increase of contacts (x3) and of current registrations (x2). Future Online Marketing Recommendations: we recommend continuing adwords campaigns throughout the year, and implementing different optimizations to improve the campaign efficiency: Improve tracking and move from quantitative to qualitative analysis (profitability by keyword): the Google AdWords campaign will require regular analysis. This involves to implement better quality tracking and to set up a conversion funnel to identify the profitability of each ad group or keyword. Improve the ads conversion rate thanks to Google services and universal campaigns: conversion is a major issue because it affects the profitability of campaigns. We suggest creating more attractive and better performing ads based on other Google services (Google Places, Google +, YouTube...), and to improve customer browsing, with the development of a mobile site version, to allow a better use of universal campaigns. Optimize our costs by taking a leadership position in the defensive with a stronger activation in September: we recommend being ubiquitous on defensive during the whole year, and investing on offensive keyword (other combat sports for example) during the peak of activity in September. Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 1

2 Industry Component Campaign overview: The Adwords campaign of the kravmaga-paris.fr website aimed to create awareness about Krav Maga and more particularly to generate qualified leads for the Krav Maga Paris Club. This campaign exceeded our objectives. Indeed we managed: To be precise with the determination of our goals thanks to tools as the Keywords Generator Tool, the Adwords Traffic Estimator and the Display Network Adplanner. To complete and exceed these goals with a fine and daily management of our campaigns and a accurate selection of our. To test advanced features that we had not considered at the beginning of the campaign, such as call extensions that provided interesting and useful results later on. Objectives Planned Realized Var.% Impressions % Clicks % CTR 1% 0,86% -14% CPC $0,35 $0,23-31% Contacts % Subscriptions % Sales $2310 $ % Margin $462 $ % ROI 83% 331% 299% Campaign objectives and % of realization These results are all the more significant that we have deliberately chosen an unknown subject, Krav Maga, on a limited territory, the city of Paris. They show the value of a tool like Adwords for trade owners or small associations to promote their business and website, even on a limited geographical area and with a small budget. One disappointment was the difficulty to target female population, mainly due to the lack of awareness of this sport and the very low volume of search on the female self-defense theme. We overcame this issue by redirecting our campaign towards all populations, and by targeting queries on other martial arts. Campaign organization: the campaign was planned and diffused from 05/20/2013 to 06/09/2013, on both the Search and Display Networks: Budget allocation by Ad group: Adgroup Network From to Impr. Clicks Cost Alain Formaggio - women Display 5/20/13 6/4/ $ - Close combat - women Display 5/20/13 6/4/ $ - Krav Maga - women Display 5/20/13 6/8/ $ 4,43 Krav Maga Display 5/25/13 6/8/ $ 17,28 Self défense - women Display 5/20/13 6/8/ $ 3,87 Alain Formaggio Search 5/20/13 6/9/ $ 2,48 Championnat de France de Krav Maga Search 6/4/13 6/9/ $ 0,19 Close combat Search 5/20/13 6/9/ $ 2,74 Cours de Krav Maga Search 5/20/13 6/9/ $ 122,95 Dojo de grenelle Search 5/28/13 6/9/ $ 7,71 Krav Maga féminin Search 5/20/13 6/9/ $ 7,01 Krav Maga Paris Search 5/20/13 6/9/ $ 46,54 Self défense Search 5/20/13 6/9/ $ 25,60 Self défense féminine Search 5/20/13 6/9/ $ 9,19 Total $ 250,00 Complementary to the ad groups and site links scheduled at the beginning, we gradually added: 3 Ad extensions: 2 Google Places locations extensions and 1 call extension by the end 1 additional ad group on the Display network, mixed men / women, 3 additional Search Ad groups: "Découvrir le Krav Maga" ("Discover Krav Maga"), "Dojo de Grenelle" (the club room, which also houses many other sports), and finally "Championnat de France de Krav Maga" (French Krav Maga Championship) to cover the recent victories of the best club students). Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 2

3 0,92% 4,40% 0,10% 94,58% Title Sitelink Phone calls Adresses Direct Marketing and E-business (MDCE) We had a late access to the Google Analytics account, so that we only identified by the end of the second week that even if the website kravmaga-paris.fr is not optimized for smartphones, 14% of visits come from mobile devices. We finally switched our campaign to a Universal one at the beginning of the third week, and built a call extension with the Club number. Evolution of the campaign strategy: We aimed to generate a stream of qualified visits throughout the period without exposing ourselves on a too high CPC. We performed iteratively by progressive tests and tried to capitalize on the results obtained after specific optimizations. We sought to keep a satisfactory click through rate and cost per click, and to maintain a middle position between the first and second place. Some of our preliminary choices, like location extensions, were decisive for the efficiency of our campaign. They let us achieve our goals by the end of the first 2 weeks, and then expand the scope of our experience by switching to a "universal" campaign. We allocated half of the $250 budget on the first week, with a daily budget of $13 on the search campaign and $5.2 on the display one to generate a large visibility and then optimize gradually our CPC. However, the small number of impressions at the beginning of the campaign, the low CTR (0.34% in average) and the quite high CPC (0.22 ) on the Display network compared with the search, has led us to reassign the unconsumed budget on the two other weeks. 1st week (5/20 to 5/26): the first week was a week of shimming. We observed the ad groups set at the beginning of the campaign and sought to determine what the areas of improvement were. We quickly identified a diffusion issue due to the women targeting. So we added older age groups in display (35 to 54) and finally removed the concept of age. We also increased CPC with a bad position (4 or 5). We then increased the number of and changed the "Krav Maga" ad group to "Cours de Krav Maga" (Krav-maga Classes) to be more efficient with the user queries. We also added an ad group "Découvrir le Krav Maga" (Discovering Krav maga), positioned on other martial sports queries, in order to promote this sport. The results until the weekend were good in terms of CTR (up to 6.21% in Search), quite relative in clicks (between 36 and 52 per day), but insignificant on Display impressions. So we created a mixed campaign Display which subsequently generated the greatest number of impressions among our ad groups. 2nd week (5/27-6/2): During this week we managed to generate more impressions on our campaigns, including display. We adjusted our bids and complete our to gradually reduce the CPC of the Search ad groups. We used the daily proposals of the keyword tool and the search terms to add new. We also expanded the geographic targeting on Display to the entire Ile-de-France region, and increased our ad groups CPC max to $0.52 on average, with a few higher exceptions on bids with greater competition. In the meantime, we limited the Display daily budget to $2.6 to control the budget increase. The effect was reactive: the number of impressions was multiplied by 10 and the number of clicks finally took off, but in a smaller proportion. As an opposite result, the CTR of our campaigns collapsed and the average CPC increased by 50%. We tried to reduce gradually the campaign costs, disengaging too expensive, but without succeeding to maintain the volume of clicks on the campaign. The daily budget was higher than the average of $ 15.6 set at the beginning of the campaign, so we reduced the Display budget to $ 1.3 to focus on the Search campaign. Our portfolio Search ads worked mainly on the "Cours de Krav Maga" (Krav Maga Classes) ad group, generating 78% of all clicks by itself. We created a new Ad group "Dojo de Grenelle", and finalized the setting of the Google Place Location Extension "Krav Maga Paris". Then we sought to optimize the efficiency of our various ad groups by working on long tail, gradually reducing the maximum CPC of each ad group and, and disabling too expensive on the campaign "Découvrir le Krav Maga" (Discover Krav Maga). This ad group proved its interest as being focused on competing sport (jujitsu, tae kwon do, karate...). It generated 66% of the impressions realized by the campaign during the 2nd week and brought traffic (23% of clicks) behind the main ad group "Krav Maga Course" (55% of clicks). We ended the week by turning off the least efficient ads in terms of both CTR and average CPC, to ensure to begin the last week with only the best ads running. Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 3

4 Cost per click (CPC) 20/5 22/5 24/5 26/5 28/5 30/5 1/6 3/6 5/6 7/6 9/6 Direct Marketing and E-business (MDCE) 3rd week (6/3 to 6/9): At the beginning of the third week and thanks to the last optimizations, we had almost reached our campaign objectives, with more than 65,000 impressions, 700 clicks, a CTR of 1.07% and an average CPC of $ However, we only had consumed $169.7 of our budget. Thus we had the opportunity to test new features with the remaining budget. By analyzing the website traffic we identified that it generated about 14% of mobile visits, an opportunity for us to test an extension call and switch to universal campaign. This was made from Tuesday. We also tried to take advantage of the Club sporting results by creating a dedicated ad group on the "Championnat de France Krav Maga" (French Krav Maga championship) in order to capitalize on queries made on this event. Unfortunately, the ad group generated only few impressions and only one click. We identified that our CTR was highly degraded by the end of the week. We did not want to jeopardize the objectives achieved during the first 2 weeks. In Display, we removed the websites generating many impressions but no clicks, and disabled less efficient on our search ad groups in order to focus on those in line with our acquisition strategy (Krav maga / Self-defense feminine). The results remaining inadequate, the entire Display campaign had been paused on 8/06. Key results In this part we mainly focused the Search campaign, as the Display campaign created only few clicks ,00% 6,00% 5,00% 4,00% 3,00% 2,00% 1,00% 0,00% The main results of our campaign are represented besides. On the graph we can notice a CTR decrease by the 26th of May. It is linked to the creation of the general ad group Discover Krav Maga which only had competitors sports. Anyway this ad group helped us to drive more clicks and traffic. Clicks CTR Each of our nine ad groups received clicks (but there was one ad group with only one click). Every ad group had a CTR above 1.50% except the adgroup Découvrir le Krav Maga (Discover Krav Maga), which was positioned on competitors sports. 4 adgroups accounted for more than 90% of total clicks in the search campaign. Traffic quality $0,40 $0,35 $0,30 $0,25 $0,20 $0,15 $0,10 $0,05 $- Overview of the 4 main ad groups Discovering Krav Maga Self defense Krav Maga classes Self defense for women 0,00% 2,00% 4,00% 6,00% 8,00% Click-through rate (CTR) The traffic quality generated on site by the Google AdWords campaign was pretty good. The table below shows that an internet user from the Google AdWords campaign looks as many pages on the site as a user from a natural result. The percentage of new visits is significantly higher. Finally, the bounce rate from Google AdWords campaigns is significantly better than "natural" visits. Thus we consider the correspondence between our ads and landing pages was consistent. Traffic Type Visits Pages / Visit Avg. Visit Duration % New Visits Bounce Rate Paid :03: % 40.31% Organic :03: % 47.63% Total :03: % 43.6% Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 4

5 Characteristics of each ad group are listed below: Alain Formaggio: This ad group which represents 1% of total clicks aims to create a link between the teacher name and the club. This ad group has a very high CTR: 7.50%, clearly above the average of the campaign. Close combat: the Close combat ad group generated very few traffic and cost only $2.82. CTR was a little above the average of the campaign (2.15%), and the CPC was quite good. Discovering Krav Maga (Découvrir le Krav Maga): this ad group was added after one week of campaign but represents our second main source of clicks (14%). It is only composed of competitors sports, as karate or tae kwon do, aiming to encourage people interested in martial arts to try krav maga. Not surprisingly this ad group had the lowest CTR (0.64%). Dojo de Grenelle + France championship (Championnat de France): we created these 2 ad groups during the last week of the campaign, with the study of the search requests with Google Analytics. We realized that a significant number of requests done on Google and to go to the Krav Maga Paris website came from these 2 topics. Their CTR is almost 2%. Krav Maga classes (cours de Krav Maga): this ad group accounts for the main part of our clicks and has had a very high CTR: 5.39%. It is composed of the greatest number of, each one directly related with Krav maga, and we achieved the better CPC of the campaign with this ad group ($0.20). Krav maga for women (Krav Maga féminin): we are very proud of this ad group CTR (14%). The CPC is quite high ($0.34) but as it was one of our main goals (to make Krav Maga known by women) we decided to have high bids on those. Self-defense: this ad group CTR was not so good compared with the others. As Krav Maga is only one of many self-defense sports, we suppose that people looking for a self-defense sport could not be interested by Krav Maga. Self-defense for women (Self défense féminin): this ad group had very good results too. It created more and less expensive clicks than the previous one, but the CTR was lower (but still good: almost 7%). Our two ad groups dedicated to women worked very well. However they were not able to generate enough traffic. Women interest in krav maga thanks to a keyword analysis: % Clics 96 % 4% 4% of total clicks came from a woman clearly targeted request, with the presence of this keyword (or synonym) in the query. It seems few; however, we realize that it is proportional to the number of women enrolled in the krav maga club this year. $0,32 $0,23 CPC Woman 9,41% 2,32% CTR Mixed Woman Mixed Regarding performances, the click through rate is much better for these women targeted. This reveals both that our ads were catchy (we ensured that the feminine aspect of the sport appears in the title of the ad) and that they have a real interest in the sport, and are looking for more information. Their CPC is higher, but to make Krav Maga known by women was one of our goals and we were ready to have high bids. CPC CTR Defensive or Aggressive keyword strategy? In order to make known Krav Maga to people who have never heard about, we created the ad group "discover Krav Maga," composed of of other combat sports. The purpose was to target people who like martial arts but do not know especially Krav Maga. This was typically an aggressive strategy. Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 5 $0,40 $0,30 $0,20 $0,10 $0,00 Defensive General Aggressive 6,00% 4,00% 2,00% 0,00%

6 49% Impressions 34% 17% Defensive General Aggressive 16% 11% Clicks 73% Defensive : all containing the word Krav Maga and misspellings. General : match the type of sport such as close combat / self-defense. Aggressive : match others combat sports or completely different martial arts Defensive General Aggressive Despite the large number of aggressive prints, the number of clicks is low. It seems logical because a user looking for a particular sport will often chose the link which is directly related with its focus. However, the clicks we generated through this ad group are very strategic for us as fully consistent with our goal for the campaign. Not surprisingly, the defensive had lower CPC and higher CTR, especially since we had a quality score close to 10. Setting up a campaign with an aggressive strategy is only a good thing to make known a product. But it is more expensive and performances are very low. As a bonus of this study, we identified that: 2 had generated more than 33% of the total traffic from the search campaign: [krav maga] clicks and [krav maga paris] clicks we achieved very low CPC in some : [krav maga club] : 0,01, dojo de grenelle : 0,04, club daumesnil krav maga : 0,04 Future recommendations: The campaign s results are very positive and show the relevance of Google AdWords, with the creation of an inexpensive and quality traffic. We recommend continuing adwords campaigns throughout the year with a stronger activation in September (beginning of the year for sports associations). Nevertheless we think that some aspects of the AdWords campaign could be improved, to better meet the "business" challenges of the association: reducing cost of contacts, generating quality traffic that is easily analyzable, converting the best possible these contacts into new customers : Improve the tracking and the campaign analysis: in the future, it would be essential to ensure the implementation of tracking tags on the whole campaign. That will allow getting full information in Google Analytics and conducting a complete analysis of the campaign, with both quantitative data (number of visits from the AdWords campaign) and qualitative data (time spent on site, bounce rate of visits from Google AdWords campaigns...). Move from quantitative to qualitative analysis (profitability by keyword): it would be interesting to set up a conversion funnel and conversion objectives based on several criteria such as "the arrival on the contact page" in Google Analytics. With this implementation we will be able to exclude all whose conversions or goals are not achieved. Improve the ads conversion rate thanks to Google services: thanks to these three weeks campaign we have seen the importance of Google services such as YouTube, Google Places and Google + in the valuation of ads or pages. Visibility of Krav Maga Paris could be improved with those tools. Conversion rate can also be increased by offering call to actions more relevant for the consumer (phone number, map, video presentation...). Google AdWords is also testing a feature that gets back address in the ad. It can be very useful for an activity such as Krav Maga, which requires a period of familiarization (discovered in video, recruitment ing...). Optimizing the website to establish universal campaigns: the conversion rate improvement also involves optimizing the website itself, for example by creating a mobile friendly website with responsive content: sport videos, contact page... Optimizing our costs: take a leadership position in the defensive : we realized that defensive generated an inexpensive and quality traffic. We recommend capitalizing on this solution to become the reference in krav maga on the web. This goal requires an investment of 9 / day only (13 /day during September). Optimizing costs: aggressive keyword campaigns for September: it might be worth investing in an offensive keyword campaign that aims to convince fans of other combat sports to try Krav Maga. This strategy implies to accept higher average CPC. We recommend this type of campaign especially for the recruitment period in September. The daily budget would be from 5 to 10. We suggest creating a distinctive campaign on these (unlike what we did). Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 6

7 Learning Component Learning objectives and outcomes: On April 2013, we had training on Google AdWords during the Google Academy which took place in Lille (a northern city in France). Google Online Marketing Challenge gave us the opportunity to carry out a real business case and develop our knowledge on Search Engine Marketing. Within our group, we all came from different horizons meaning than some of us already had experience using Google AdWords. We tried to all help each other and it has created a very great dynamic within the group. Once we knew the basis of Google AdWords, we learned how to optimize a pay-per-click campaign while reducing the cost per click and increasing the quality of the traffic. We also discovered the brand-new features powered by Google AdWords such as Adwords Keywords Planner Group dynamics: We all live in different cities in France, so we used several Google tools to coordinate the project such as Google Hangouts and Google Drive. Throughout the three-week campaign, we have defined a specific strategy in order to get the best results. We made three teams of two students to follow the campaign during each week. Every single evening we held a follow-up meeting using Google Hangout to analyze the campaign and make live modifications. Each week we had a meeting with the entire team in order to discuss decisions and results, and to transfer the follow-up information from a group to another. Thanks to Google Drive, we created a logbook where we described all the changes we made during the campaign. The spreadsheet was divided into four columns: date, campaign (search or display network), ad group, description of the results obtained and of the changes made. This logbook shared on Google Drive was a very efficient tool to help us to forecast the campaign, and to transfer easily the follow-up at the weekly monitoring appointment. Google Drive also helped us write down the pre-campaign report and the post-campaign report. Real-time modifications, the integrated chat were some key features which enabled us to share our expertise while writing the documents. As we are not native English speakers, we also used Google Translate to double check the quality of our English. Finally, managing this Challenge was not obvious at all considering the burden of substantial work related to our classes and component projects, but also the jobs that we all have. Indeed, as part of our training classes, we spend three quarters of our time in business, to perform an activity in connection with the classes. Finding enough time to spend on the Google Marketing Challenge was still a tough affair by itself. Client dynamics: The administrators of the club were very keen to learn that we have chosen them for the challenge when we first met them. However, they were not very familiar with the benefits of the tool. Actually, we didn't have many contacts with the webmaster of the club Krav maga Paris. He is foremost martial art teacher and administers the website in addition to its core activity. He tried to be as available as possible, but some answers or access codes, to Google Analytics for example, took some time to get. In addition, we recorded the Club on Google Places, and requested validation by mail. This registration was completed only in the campaign mid-course. Fortunately, the Dojo (the establishment receiving classes) was also listed on Google Maps, which allowed us to set up a location extension from the beginning. Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 7

8 At the beginning we thought that the website did not seem to have any tracking tool. We have contacted the webmaster to propose to install Google Analytics. He provided us with access to a new Google Analytics account he set up for us at the very beginning of the campaign. Therefore, we lost a little time on setting up Google Analytics with Google AdWords. For example, several days of statistics were lost due to the lack of tracking on the URLs of the campaign: thus, the traffic generated by organic searches and generated by AdWords could not be separated in the first half our campaign. We have of course kept them informed of the results obtained by sending a regular review of progress of our campaign, and a summary of results at the end of the operation. They were very pleased and even surprised by the results obtained, considering that the campaign has generated nearly half of website visits on the observed period and much more contacts than they usually have. Future recommendations: The areas for improvement we identified at the end of this campaign are the following: better planning and allocation of roles, in order to improve everyone's involvement, optimize the time spent and avoid being in a tight deadline work, the need for everyone to do preparatory work to acquire the minimum skills necessary to understand and manage the campaign. Some of us already had experience of Adwords campaign management, others just discovered. As the choice of the company and the definition of the campaign strategy took much more time than we supposed, the most experienced ones had to compensate the lack of skills of the others by an "accelerated" training. a more successful negotiation with the client before the campaign setup to get access to all the resources necessary to carry out the acquisition campaign in the best possible conditions. Juliette Bassnagel, Quentin Declercq, Hugo Persyn, Laurent Steiger, Benjamin Vuitton Page 8