4. Operational Details
Email Campaigns
⢠Majority of online sales during competition
period came from email blasts
5. Pre-Campaign Goals:
⢠15% CTR
⢠Plan: Bid high and write relevant ad copy
⢠30% conversion rate for Purchase Intent
campaign
⢠Plan: Target searchers who are at the end of the
purchase funnel
⢠Positive ROI
6. Operational Details
Campaign start: April 5, 2012 Campaign End: April 26, 2012
3 Campaigns
⢠Purchase Intent - $6.19/day
⢠Flavor - $2.8/day
⢠Nutrition - $2.8/day
Ads ran only between 6a and 12a
Monitored frequently
Total spend: $249.87
8. Evolution of Campaign Strategy
Network Clicks Imps Cost Avg CPC
Search 49 6,418 $49.92 $1.01
Display 16 31,746 $33.29 $2.08
Major Change:
We canceled Display Network because the Avg
CPC was double that of the Search Network
11. Week 1
⢠Our ads earned no conversions; we focused
instead on Pages/Visit.
⢠Note that Pages/Visit for Apr 6 is higher than
usual because of the low number of visitors
that day
12. Week 2
Keyword Pages/Visit
What is gluten free food 1.24
Gluten free food store 2.11
Soy free protein bars 7
⢠Soy free protein bars and keywords including
âglutenâ received higher than average pages per
visit.
13. Week 3
⢠Clicks smoothed out in week 3 as our
optimization efforts gained effectiveness
15. Campaign
Campaign Impressions % of Total Clicks % of Total Clicks CTR Avg CPC Cost
Imps
Flavor 19,318 29% 77 24% 0.4% 0.58 $44.44
Nutrition 12,477 19% 166 52% 1.33% 0.27 $44.89
Purchase 35,387 53% 74 23% 0.21% 2.18 $161.62
Intent
⢠Nutrition campaign has the highest CTR.
We believe this is because the gluten
free, soy free features of PureFitâs bars are
truly unique in the market
16. Key Words
Keywords that included the word gluten were
more productive
17. Conclusion
1. Needed better data at start
2. Optimize ad landing pages
3. Focus on âglutenâ
20. Learning Objectives
We hoped to learn how to
increase PureFitâs
⢠Sales
⢠Customers
⢠Profits
21. Learning Objectives
We actually learned:
⢠Effectively monitoring and optimizing
AdWords campaigns is very time consuming
⢠How to talk about AdWords amongst other
advertisers and to our client.
⢠That customers searching for gluten or soy-free
products are very engaged in PureFitâs bars.
22. Group Dynamics
Challenges
⢠Limited availability of group members
⢠Diverse skillset
⢠Complex subject matter
Solutions
⢠Responsive and frequent emails
⢠Delegating tasks
23. Client Dynamics
Our client was enthusiastic of
our efforts and readily
reachable by phone.
24. Future Recommendations
1. More in-class, guided instruction
with Google Analytics
2. A mid-campaign report for class
discussion
Hinweis der Redaktion
As you can see, most of PureFitâs customers purchase bars from their website because of the companyâs newsletters. Other customers find the site because of PureFitâs presence at nutrition food conventions.
Our goal with this campaign was to earn a positive return on investment and to provide PureFit with campaigns that they can continue running on their own. More specifically, we aimed for a 15% CTR overall and a 30% conversion rate for the Purchase Intent campaign.
Our campaign started on April 5 and finished on April 26. We chose these dates for no particular reason other than that April 5 was the earliest day we could begin. Throughout the campaign, we met regularly to discuss the clicks and the costs of clicks for each ad and keyword.By the end of the competition we spent $249.87, only 13 cents shy of the total amount given to us by Google.
Evolution of Campaign Strategy
The first major change we made to our strategy was removing our ads from Googleâs Display Network. Within the first week and a half we noticed that the clicks from the Display Network cost 100% more than search, and visitors from the Display Network had a 90% bounce rate.
As a result of our change, our account-wide average cost per click decreased by 50%. This was our first major change during the competition, and we were nervous that it wouldnât have any effect on the cost per click or, even worse, that for some reason it would make CPC increase! Fortunately, removing the display network was incredibly effective at lowering CPC and it motivated us to make further changes.
For the first week, since our ads had not yet earned any conversions, we used Pages per Visit as our success metric. We gave higher priority to ads with a higher PPV. Also note that the spike in PPV on April 6 was the result of the small amount of clicks on that day and is thus the result of sampling error.
In week two we continued to use PpV as our success metric and we noticed that certain keywords were starting to outperform others. For example, you can see here that âsoy free protein barsâ and âgluten free food storeâ had more pages per visit than did âwhat is gluten free foodâ. This makes sense given the content of the site, and as a result we focused more on the Gluten- and soy-free features of PureFits products.
During the 3rd week our campaign had started to smooth out with relatively predictable clicks per day and a fairly consisten PpV. We believe this indicates that our optimization efforts during the first two weeks were showing their effectiveness.
The Nutrition campaign had the highest CTR with 1.53%, while Purchase Intent had the lowest CTR. We hypothesise that Purchase Intent had the lowest CTR because our high bid increased its impressions while our broad keywords often caused the campaign to display on un-related searches. The Nutrition campaign, on the other hand, had a high CTR because of its more targeted and relevant keywords.
We can see from this list of the top 10 keywords that the most productive keywords included the word âglutenâ. We were especially surprised by the keyword âgluten free food storeâ receiving so many pages per visit and we think it indicates that PureFit.com clearly explains the benefit of Gluten free food.
Weâll summarize our campaign with these three points:We could have been more effective if we had more historical sales analytics from the outset. When we started the campaign we only had 4 weeks of sales data, so we had to use our ads to fill in the gaps of our knowledge.Optimize the ad landing pages to better match the content of the website. We had limited access to PureFitâs website developer, which made customizations to page content cumbersome. We could have increased our quality score and lowered our CPC if we had the ability to make PureFit.comâs content more relevantOur keyword results clearly show that the subject of gluten is one in which PureFit excells. We bleieve the company should consider strengthening its market position as a âgluten-freeâ nutrition bar by providing more educational content about gluten and what it means to be gluten-free
We have three recommendations that PureFit can use to improve their future AdWords campaigns.Start small. PureFit should consider creating 1 campaign entirely dedicated to keywords related to Gluten, and optimizing that campaign until it is consistently highly profitable. Our campaigns were very general and broad because we didnât have historical sales data. PureFit now has that data and can use it to target gluten searchers.Purchase intent. Future AdWords campaigns should also focus on purchase intent keywords, perhabs as an ad group within a Gluten specific campaign. PureFit has a large margin on their products with which to experiement, so they can create landing pages advertising discounts and sales for the Purchase Intent ads.3. Optimize. Optimization of PureFit.com and of the siteâs ads and keywords should be an ongoing, scheduled task for PureFit going forward. We now know from experience that the process can take a long time, and since new competitiors are always popping up, PureFitâs optimization job will be totally finished.
We initially planned to learn how to increase PureFitâs sales customers and ultimately, profits. We hoped to increase their customers by introducing fitness enthusiasts who also had allergies to PureFitâs products. We had no way of measuring directly weather customers who clicked on our ads would become a customer of PureFItâs later on down the road.
By the end of the campaign we had learned several things. First, monitoring AdWords campaigns is very time consuming. Second, we learned how to talk to other advertisers about the challenges and opportunities that adwords presents and we learned how to discuss adwords results with our client. Third, we learned that consumers looking for gluten-free or soy-free products are more engaged with PureFitâs products than other fitness or allergy consumers.
We faced several challenges with our Group Dynamics, but we were able to overcome or work around all of them. Each group member is very busy with school, work and extra-curricular activities, so scheduling face-to-face meetings was always a challenge. We overcame this obstacle by agreeing to send regular emails and to always be responsive. Our group also had a very diverse skillset, which as initially a challenge but becamse a benefit once we delegated tasks based on each memberâs abiliites.
Our experience working with RobDorf, the owner of PureFit, was excellent. Although Mr. Dorf, as an entrepreneur, was very busy, he was always responsive via phoen and email, and most importantly, he was very enthusiastic and supportive of our ideas and ambition.
As a group, we could have benefited from more personalized and guided in-class instruction. A hands-on follow-along example of creating a campaign, ad groups and ads would have been extremely helpful. Also, we would have benefited from an un-graded mid-campaign report to the class so that we could present the problems our campaign is having and crowdsource solutions from the class.