Google Online Marketing Challenge 2009 | All You Need is Conversion team

In the middle of the challenge...

2009-05-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

Author: Olivier Morvan

We now are in the middle of the GOMC.
As the report analyst of the team, I am in charge of analyzing metrics every day and I would like to share some data with you:

- 11 conversions
- Conversion rate: 3, 13%
- CPC: $0, 37
- Cost per conversion: $11, 73
- 351 clicks

We are doing our best to optimize the campaign day after day and we basically use 4 meanings to increase our CTR and conversions:

1. Keywords optimizations based on their performance according to AdWords reports:
For example, we deleted some low search volume keywords and keywords that made no impression since the beginning of the GOMC. This action should significantly increase our quality score.
Furthermore, thanks to the search query performance report we added new keywords in AdGroups like "Otaku" and "Forum" to generate more impressions and traffic for the "Générique" campaign.
Finally, we paused keywords that generated many impressions but no click.

2. We are constantly improving our ads through A/B testing thanks to the rotating ads feature of Google AdWords:
- We wrote news ads every day and observed that some of them were more powerful than other, so we only kept the best
- Then, we duplicated the ads with two different landing pages. We observed that our conversion rate was better when ads directly points on the sign-up page so we choose this landing page for most of our ads.
We are still making tests...Wait & See

3. We increased bids to be in top position:
- If people don’t click on our ads it is not because of bad position. So we concluded that the ad is not efficient and we have to change it.
It was crucial for the “Google Network Campaign”, because if your ad isn’t on the top 2 or 4 it isn’t displayed. We used placement performance reports and Google AdWords Editor to analyze data.

4. We split AdGroups to have more specific ads.

We are in the home stretch now. The final report will be made in few days.
Stay tuned!

First website to share ideas around Google AdWords

2009-05-11T02:10:00.001-07:00

Seven students from HETIC (a school training students in Information Technologies (IT) field.), decided to create MyAdwIdea: a community site where you can share ideas on Google AdWords.

MyAdwIdea is a place where all AdWords users can register to post, discuss or vote on one or more ideas. Each of these ideas is classified by categories and can be followed in a personal dashboard.

A voting system ensures the relevance of the user’s posts. On the main page of the site is a ranking of ideas for a better visibility of good ideas.

The website's goal is to give feedbacks of different users of Google AdWords.The rubriquage allows to exactly know what is the most needed, or the most popular.

The long term goal is to convince Google to consider the best ideas for the optimization of Google AdWords.

The website is available at:

www.myadwidea.com

Optimizations and results

2009-05-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

We launched our campaign 5 days ago and I finally found a moment to write this post.

The good news is that the client and the team are both happy with the first results of the campaign! Our ads are most of the time on premium position and thanks to the Google analytics stats we know that we are driving very qualified traffic on the client's website:

the average time spent on the web site is higher
the number of pages viewed is also higher
the conversion rate is much more higher !

Google Analytics data

First, we were really disappointed by the very low CTR on our Google network content campaign but we try to calm down and not to do something we could regret after and we decided to give a chance to this campaign. After a few days we can say that we made a good choice: the campaign is driving traffic and clicks and it even started to make conversion. We now understand that the number of impressions and the low CTR of that campaign isn't so important as it drives very qualified traffic (people coming from the google network campaign spend more time on the web site). Furthermore, the low CTR of this campaign doesn't affect the quality score of our other campaigns.

Our 3 search campaignss registered good CTR but we have few conversion, so we try to write our ads with call to action and Stéphane designed a new landing page with the sign-up form. We will try to redirect people in the form and see if it's more efficient or not.

We are continually improving our ad texts through A/B testing and it takes a lot of time.
We also analyze the results of the reports every single day and we add negative keyword, change the keyword targetting, add new keywords... It's a lot of work but we can see the effect of our actions in real time and it's really encouraging and challenging.

Improving ad texts together on a big screen :)

Our AdWords strategy

2009-05-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Author: Stéphane Villaréal

We send our pre-campaign strategy report to Google last week, so I think it's time to reveal a little about our strategy.

Our client, Total Manga, is a content-based website written in French which deals with mangas and Japan culture. Because of this context and the limited budget, we will only target French language and specially France. Due to the budget limitation and thanks to the analytics data, we will put our campaigns on when there is high organic traffic and turn it off the rest of the day.

Concerning our campaigns and the AdWords strategy, we took inspiration from the structure of the web site and we adapted this one into a logical organization keeping in mind the particular goal and settings of each campaign and grouping similar keywords together. We will particularly focus on two parts of the site: “Mangas”, the most successful section and “Japan”, which is a section dedicated to the Japanese culture. This section makes the difference between Total Manga and its rivals. We will launch our keywords with high bids and we will gradually lower the bid maintaining a top 3 ad position. To achieve a good click through rate, we will set up rotate ad serving and constantly improve the ad texts through A/B testing.

Our Key Performance Indicators will be the number of signs up to the forum and to the newsletter, the average time spent on site and the bounce rate.

We just launched our campaign this morning, so we will give you soon our first results and optimizations.

See yaa

Have you tested the new AdWords interface?

2009-03-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

A brand new interface of AdWords is now available in beta version.

The promess of this new interface is to manage your AdWords campaigns in a faster, clearer and more intuitive way. I think, I will try it as soon as possible.

St. Patrick's Day display ad templates are now available in the display ad builder

2009-03-07T15:13:00.000-08:00

For a few weeks, you can now create display ads in your AdWords account thanks to the ad builder tool. There are several ad templates and you can entirely customize them. You can choose the background color, the fonts, the images and the text of your ad. Then, it is automatically created in the standard sizes.

To celebrate the St. Patrick's Day, two ad templates are available in the "seasonal" category of the display ad builder: so, give some luck to your campaigns !

(Via: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/03/st-patricks-day-display-ad-templates.html)

A brief presentation of our advertiser: Total Manga

2009-02-27T10:53:00.000-08:00

Author: Samuel Le Maux

As the name suggests it, Total Manga deals with manga. It is often updated by the administrator and visited by a large and active community of fans who also contribute with their comments.

Total Manga defines itself as : “…a manga website dedicated to Japanese culture, bringing the essential of manga news, j-music, drama, video games and Japanese culture."

When you arrive on the home page, you can navigate through a menu and a submenu

In the MENU you will found:

General – Manga – Anime – Drama – J Music – Games – Japan

And for each of this thematic the SUBMENU contains the following categories :

News – sheet – celebrities– reports – forum

Or, you may choose to check the last news or reports.

There is also a specific access for members, because they are allowed to do some “extras” things like leaving a comment, or participating to the frequent competitions.

The competitions aim to federate the existing community and attract new comers with easy games. For example, last week you could win a DVD of Bleach (memories of nobody).

On Total Manga, there is also several places where the advertisers can display their ads. For the moment, it's not really profitable and that's why Total Manga needs more trafic. We truly think that AdWords can bring the expected trafic.

In the GOMC context, we think that Total Manga is a really good choice because Japanese culture and manga thematic are trendy. Furthermore, the news and Total Manga’s community are both animated and it’s really motivating.

I also have to mention that the advertiser is a really cool guy who has a great knowledge of his business and he knows how to do business with the internet. It’s a huge advantage for us as he is an expert in SEO and Google Analytics. He gave us access to his Google Analytics account and it’s really interesting for us to examine how he configured this account. In exchange, we will help him understanding how AdWords works and can be cleverly used for his business.

A new AdWords forum

2009-02-24T16:31:00.000-08:00

Google moved the AdWords forum on a new platform. It will now be easier and faster for us to obtain answers to our questions.

So, what did exactly change ?

Better search tool of the messages ;
Possibility of being "Main contributors" for those who participate and help regularly ;
System of reputation and classification ;
Users, "Main contributors" and Googlers can mark a question as being answered ;
Simpler access to the Google AdWords Help center ;
Improved profile which emphasizes your activity in the forum.

You can now go to this new forum and give your feedback !

Source: http://adwords-fr.blogspot.com

Learning AdWords in french

2009-02-22T13:54:00.000-08:00

We take advantage of being on holidays for one week to learn a lot of things about AdWords. But, even if we can undertand videos or documents in english, it's always easier to learn in our native language.

So, we decided to try to find some learning stuff in French and we discover these two:

It's a great news: we can now improve our AdWords knowledge in french !

Success starts with the right client

2009-02-19T10:19:00.000-08:00

Author: Marjorie Soutric

The opportunity to work with a real client is probably the most interesting part of the Google Challenge. It brings us the chance to acquire a true experience in the marketing field and to compete with professionals thanks to the $200 provided by Google.

Choosing the right client is essential for the success of our campaign and for the motivation of all the team. We contacted many websites and finally selected five that were in accordance with the requirements of the challenge. Then, we arranged a meeting in order to select the one that will share this adventure with us. The choice goes to Total Manga. All the members of the team were seduced by the theme, the values and the content of the website, so we all start the Google Online Marketing Challenge with the same enthusiasm!

Building the perfect team

2009-02-03T10:32:00.000-08:00

Winning the Google Online Marketing Challenge is an international honor and everyone in the team shares the same dedication to the goal of learning and winning.

As we know that synergy is the most important factor for a team to perform, we tried to make the perfect team. To guarantee the synergy, we build a group of 4 students. We are already familiar with each other and each other’s work as we made some projects together before the GOMC.

All You Need is Conversion Team

Even if we have different skills and background, we all share these qualities:

• A genuine interest for the Challenge
• Spend a lot of time on the internet
• Have a sense of professionalism in work and actions
• Learn fast

We are all thrilled to start this challenge and we are now to ready to give of our best.