What did we learn?

• Misplaced campaign Design:

At the beginning we put two popular events in one campaign as two different adgroups but one event which was more popular ate up the whole daily budget so another has no click for a days. Thus, we separated one event from another and made it a new campaign. Besides, under each campaign, we also created adgroups to target different segments of the ad audience for creating their set of Adwords.

• Innovative ad groups:

Although originally we had set up some ad groups and target consumers, but it was not sufficient. After using the tools provided by Google Adwords like the traffic estimator tool and keyword tools, we were surprised that there are so many different consumer groups that we did not take into account.

• Refine the CPC:

At the first place, we ultimately set the ads to show impressions in “accelerated mode.” It is good to get impression, but it will cost you more to bid for the position. At last, we understood and lowered our max CPC and tried to drive our ads in “standard mode.” Fortunately, that helped us use less money and achieve more conversions, and the entire cost structure of campaign became healthier.

• Use of Network content display wisely:

Network could succeed but it could fail as well. We chose few related networks for our events, such as cnn.com, arizona.edu and kidscamp.com, and impressions and clicks were overwhelming when we started the campaign, but it lowered the CTR later on. However, we turned it on during the last week of our campaign to utilize our budget appropriately.

Campaigns Evolving!

Through the course of our campaign, we realized that due to the nature of our client, a promotional campaign would not be adequate, so we decided to split the adgroups under events to separate campaigns and not use the promotional Campaign. These are as follows:

1. Biosphere @ U of A
2. Adult Education
3. Summer Camp

Changes during Week1: Our goals were to understand which adgroups were effective and also allocate our daily budget that maximizes conversions

1. Based on our results from the first two days, we realized that our CTR was at .11% which was very low. This was essentially due to the Display networks which increased to the number of impressions to over 28,000. As a result of this, we turned off the display network for some of our campaigns. Result: Our CTR increased to 1.65% during our second week.
2. High performing ad groups were allotted separate campaigns after the third day of our campaign, like Biosphere and adult learning. Result: Increase in the conversion rate and better control over the budget.
3. We experimented with the budget by allotting relatively higher CPC to some high performing keywords. Result: Higher number of conversions from those keywords.

Changes during Week2: Our goal was to maximize our conversions and spend our budget prudently.

1. To increase our conversions, we divided our Campaign into very specific but varied ad groups. We could understand clearly which adgroups are giving us conversions and we optimized our CPC for those ad groups and paused the other adgroups. Result: We optimized our conversion and prudently spent our Budget.

Changes during Week 3: Now that we had a good strategy in place, we wanted to optimize our campaign using effective keywords and ad groups to increase our conversions.

1. Max CPC and daily budget were increased for effective campaigns.  Result: Increase in the number of conversions

Difficulties in the start!

Due to some security issues with Google, our campaigns did not start according to the schedule. We had to wait for for almost a week to get going. It was frustrating times for us as we were seeing other teams busy discussing their strategies. This really made us very anxious and realized it was time to take some action.

We spammed the inbox of Google Online Marketing Challenge with mails asking for a possible explanation and a timeline to fix the problem. After days of struggle, they finally got back to us stating:

"Some of your accounts may have been credited, but the campaigns are not running. This is due to security procedures. Google is looking into the issue and is working hard to get all the accounts up and running as soon as possible."

After seeing this mail we were a lot relieved as we all kept wondering if there was anything wrong with our campaigns earlier to this. We even went back to our drawing board and checked all the settings to see if that was what was causing this problem. But fortunately for us, the day after we received that mail from Google, we were in the hunt as our campaigns were up and running.

The Chosen Campaigns!

We have decided to go with 2 campaigns:

1. UAforYOU events 
2. Bioshpere

The UAforYOU events contains two ad-groups, one for each of the events that we are planning to promote.

Astronomy Summer Camps

Astronomy summer camp being one of them is one of the very popular events that offers hands-on experience with research-quality telescopes and interaction with leading scientists for K-12 teens, adults and educators. It is all about discovering the Eureka moment! Under the dark skies of southern Arizona, students of all ages explore "the heavens" with large telescopes and experience the excitement of scientific inquiry.

                                                               Astronomy Summer Camps                                          

Sample Ad and Keywords:

Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

The other is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute(OLLI). This a non-profit institute at the University of Arizona that meets the needs of individuals 50 years of age and older who have a love for learning and wish to  pursue it with other like-minded individuals. There are over 100 OLLI organizations in the United States, each affiliated with a college or university.

                                                           Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

Sample Ad and Keywords:

                                                                        

Biosphere 2

Biosphere, which is our second campaign, is led by a tour guide who takes you inside and under the glass. The beautiful trail system takes you on a once in a lifetime tour that lets you smell our ocean and see a tropical Rainforest up close. In addition to escorting you through the upper Biomes, your interpretive tour guide takes you through the basement "technosphere" and into the amazing lungs that help the Biosphere system breathe.

                                                       
                                                                                 Biosphere 2 K-12 School Field Trips




Sample Ad and Keywords:


      

Working on Pre-campaign strategy report

We have successfully created and connected the Google Adwords account to our Google analytics account. Currently we are working on our pre-campaign strategy report. After analyzing the tasks that need to be done for this report, we divided them up into various fragments. Each of us are working on different parts of the report. We are trying to focus our attention on events like Summer camps and Indian art fare for designing our Adwords.  Simultaneously, we are also brainstorming on the possible keywords for the events that we have shortlisted. We are still to decide on how many events and keywords to go with for the first week. 

Goals of our project

Since our project leader Nisha has been working for our client for quite some time, she is very familiar with the business of our client. During the face to face meeting with our client -- Dr. Sara Chavarria, she explained to us what their current goals are, and what she aims for in our campaign.

The goals of our project are stated below:

1). To market these outreach activities to the right kind audience

For example, if a Summer Camp is organized by the Department of Science, it is open to the students belonging to the community at the University of Arizona. The Portal’s goal here is make sure that information about this activity is available to anyone from the community of Arizona (and the rest of the country, subject to the kind of event being organized) to be able to make use of the Summer Camp, being organized by the University of Arizona.

2). To ensure that everyone who conducts Outreach and Extension(which is estimated to be close to 200 users in (University of Arizona) are aware of this collaborative and join the same.

The UAforYou Portal can grow only if more members who conduct Outreach and Extension within the University join the portal and reach out to the community of Arizona by leveraging the marketing capabilities of the portal. This would be done by ensuring that users access the site and add their Outreach activity. However this goal is restricted to users at the university.

Client: UA for YOU Outreach and Extension

UA for YOU is the University of Arizona's (UA) Web Portal for the public to discover, experience and learn about UA programs, events, and resources for all ages!
It is also hoped that this site will nurture life-long relationships between families with young children and the UA as they participate in University and online programs/activities.
Visit http://uaforyou.arizona.edu to access hundreds of outreach and extension learning opportunities.

Reasons for choosing this client:

1. UAforYou is the University of Arizona’s public entryway to the events, programs and resources that the university offers to the community. They have a very specific agenda of reaching out to the community and creating awareness about the event. As a result of this, they need to be aware of the users who use and access these events.
2. UAforYou has been using Google Analytics for over a year. So there is a lot of information about how many people have been using the portal and visiting sites.
3. There are not too many places that offer Outreach and extension to the community of Arizona. So there is potential for focused goal related marketing
4. The website has very good structure and content.

Google Online Marketing Challenge

This challenge is a great opportunity for us to have a practical, real world online marketing experience. We have shortlisted two potential clients for our project that are Red Velvet (Cup Cakery) and U of A Outreach. We are working towards finalizing the final business based on all the criteria.
We are a very energetic and resourceful bunch of people, working on this project to meet all the deadlines and accomplish our tasks successfully.


Team Members

Karthik Venkatesh
Shravanthi Srivatsan
Nisha rao
Chris Hsieh
Claudia Yang