Presentation of results

After all the hard work that we were doing some results coming up! On the 17th May, we had our last presentation for the Google Challenge at ECU University. It was a multicultural and representative day. Peter, our tutor, suggested that for that they y should wear something related with our culture or our clients. Some of the teams were really creative! The team for Busta Groove Dance Studio appeared in dancewear (2 boys). The team for Radiator, represent they group in beachwear to be a sign of the culture of Australia and their client’s customers, and our team, Chocolate Art, try to show something representative for each of our countries. That our group won the award for second best blog, so now we hope to continue receiving prizes!!

Here we will show you some photos of our presentation day:

All Google Challenge Participants with Peter Ling
They accepted the freaky Challenge too!

Chocolate Art - ECU Team - Thomas, Kirsty, Ellie & Lucy (from left to right)

The Team with our Tutor Peter Ling

During the presentation

The boy of the Team during the presentation

ECU International Representative & The Team
Second prize for the Best Blog

Maybe it is just the end of the beginning. We keep working into the Google Challenge and more results will come up. The team is positive, we are working hard and enjoying the experiences of accept the Challenge 2010 with ECU!

Consequently to accept a freaky challenge!

To accept the challenge 2010 was not a difficult job. When Peter Ling introduced the concept of The Google Online Marketing Challenge we decide to confront the challenge and be part of it. We was interested to be part of the Challenge because we think it is a good experiences to work with something real that can give us the opportunity to poof our self and learn more.

Related note: Freaky Challenge!!!

For our first meeting we discuss a little bit about the project, our goals and the way that we wanted work as a team. Each member of the group made a list with all the potential clients. Ellie took the control of everything; she was entrepreneurial and so helpful for the group. She was who send the emails to the possible clients and explained the idea about this project. She gave a way to the team, for this reason we decided lift her as a leader. Thomas is the male side of the team; we needed a man view in the group. At this time the team was ready to work!

So far we have not had any problems at all, everything is flowing naturally. Our contact is provided by mail, text messages and we had some meetings. Always we divide the work and everyone is responsible for it. We coopered to each other, as a team we seek to look for new and creative solutions that will help all members of the team and we tried to integrate out individuals goals. Work in groups helps increase productivity clearly (more than one head think better that one).

As a team, we stared to interacting and organising all our ideas, issues and weakness, to find the equilibrium between us. We learn, unconscious, about the each other, discover how to communicate and listen to all members of the group, we try to be a games players and accept the multiple different between us. It is very interesting experiences for our formation as a professional.

All the material support for Google is really useful and easy to understand. The Google Online Marketing Challenge is a complete document that helps us a lot, because is a simple guide that you can follow with any problems and learn a little about the internet business.
Our campaign objective was very clear for the group; we tried to create a big online presence for Chocolate Art through Google AdWords. Also we wanted seduce, attached and convinced potential customers to choose Chocolate Art cakes rather than traditional “icing” cakes for their special occasions, to rick it, we created attractive Ads to promote Chocolate Art website. Some of our successful ads:

What is next?

The campaign is over, but the Challenge no! We still working with our project and we have a couple of thing to do. Here we show you our agenda:

Mon 17/5 Presentation: We have to show our results, the structure of our campaigns and the ads that we created. Also we should to remember to the audience the objectives for the clients and the group. Basically, is a over view of all our work for the 3 weeks.

Tues 18/5 - Assessable post-campaign. Yesterday, Tuesday 11 of May, we meet to organised all the final details related with the post – campaign.

Fri 21/5 - Feedback on report from Peter Ling

Sat 22/5 – Amend report by the group

Sun 23/5 - Email amended report to client

Wed 26/5 - Feedback from client

Thurs 27/5 - Edit based on client feedback

Fri 28/5 – Email to Peter for final check

Sat 29/5 - Upload to Google through Dashboard

Fri 4/6 before 5 pm – Individual reflection give to Peter

The campaign is OVER!

The three-week campaign is ended. It ended the days of monitoring, the development of strategies to attract more browsers and analysed the budget. Maybe it is the end of only the start! It means that has only finished the "first" phase of our Challenge 2010.

Google continues to challenge us ... We have to keep going working with Chocolate Art in association with ECU. Please, have a look of our last report about our campaign (we were posting all our results every day, because to monitoring the campaign was exciting front the begging to the end... Well this is another theme that we are going to keep for another post).

9 May 2010
Morning shift by Ellie
This morning has been fairly slow as predicted. 6 clicks in total - 5 in Themed and 1 in Weddings. Overall CTR 1.10%.

Since we have at least 10% of the budget left, I decided to up the budgets to $10.00 per campaign, and up both CPC to $1.00. This is just to try and get some last clicks before the end!

Afternoon shift by Kirsten
So far today we have received a total of 18 clicks, more than I predicted. 12 of these have been during the afternoon shift - 6 in Weddings and 6 in Themed Cakes. Our CT is up from 1.10% in the morning to 1.22% at the end of the afternoon. The average positions for both campaigns are also fairly high - 2.4 for Weddings and 2.1 for Themed. We have spent $6.87 of our $20.00 daily budget.

Evening shift by Kirsten
Great results today considering it's a Sunday and Mother's Day! We have received a total of 42 clicks, 16 in Weddings and 26 in Themed Cakes. The CTR and Avg. Positions have both improved throughout the evening, with the CTR being 1.61% and the Avg. Position being 2.3 for Weddings and 2 for Themed. These improved positions have most likely helped us get more clicks today. We have spent $15.18 of our $20.00 daily budget.

As this is the final shift for the whole campaign I'd like to say what an enjoyable experience this past three weeks has been, monitoring the campaign and watching our ads running live. It will be great to get the Challenge finished, with the post campaign assignments. Thanks again guys!

First monitoring:
-The campaign began!
-The campaign is running
-Third day of campaign!
-The guard...
-Account Changed
-One week!
-First week of campaign: OVER

Just one step...

Well, we have one more day to go and the Challenge is going to be OVER... But that is "relative", because we have to continue working with our client and ECU until Friday 4 of June. We feel strange, is impossible not to be eager and nervous. Every second we want to be looking at the administrator and each time we send a mail, what stress!

8 may 2010
Account changes by Ellie: I changed the budget to $4.00 per campaign, and we've got a spare $5.00 to use as needed. If it is not needed tonight, we will just increase tomorrow's campaign's by $2.50 and whatever we get, we get.

Morning shift by Lucy
At the morning shift we got our first click at 9:05 a.m., it was in fancy Wedding cake. At the end of the morning shift we got 2 clicks, 338 impressions and 0.59% CTR. The clicks was on Themed Cakes and Wedding.

Afternoon shift by Thomas
At the end of today's afternoon shift we received a total of 24 clicks with a CTR rate of 1.77%. The budget currently stands at $8.64 out of $16.00, we should have enough funds to last through the night. The wedding campaign is doing relatively well today with a CTR rate of 2.44% and 11 clicks.

Evening shift by Thomas
At the end of today we received a total of 39 clicks with a CTR rate of 1.84%. We are well within our daily budget, spending $13.38 out of the $16.50 daily budget (50c increase by me). All of the campaign performed relatively well, 21 clicks from themed cakes and 18 clicks from wedding. The wedding cake campaign practically ran out of budget while there's a few dollars left from the themed cakes campaign. Overall in terms of the number of clicks we certainly did well today.

This will be my last shift for the GOMC and I would like to thank everyone for their efforts, I certainly had a fun time taking part in the shifts and now I look forward to completing the final report and getting this assignment done.

Thinking & Thinking

The campaign is almost over and we are thinking to do more changes during the last weekend to obtain more positives results. We are so busy thinking about how to develop more marketing strategies for our client and it kind of an addictive job, so it is going to make us crazy! However, we are enjoying every day that we are working in the Challenge 2010...

7 May 2010
Morning shift Thomas
At the end of the morning shift we used about $2.30 from our budget.

Afternoon shift by Kirsten
So far today we have received 26 clicks, 15 clicks during the afternoon shift - 2 in Weddings, 13 in Themed Cakes. We have a CTR of 1.49%, down from 1.56% at the start of the shift, and we have spent $8.23 of our $18.00 daily budget.

Evening shift by Kirsten
Today we received a total of 38 clicks, 12 of these during the evening shift (6 in Weddings, 6 in Themed Cakes). Our average Positions were good, 2.3 for Weddings and 1.9 for Themed Cakes, and we had a CTR of 1.37%. We spent $12.59 of our $18.00 daily budget.

I think for the weekend we might as well keep the budget high as we still have $40 left to spend and only these two days left. We might as well try and use as much of these as possible to get more clicks.

Working hard!

We are doing a very solid work to obtain positive results... This week we are putting all our effort to achieve our goals: have a successful closing campaign and be part of the winners. Every day we are getting more clicks, and it motivates us to keep going with the project. We want to be competitive and feel proud about our work, for this reason we every day give our best!

6 May 2010
Morning shift by Ellie
This morning we've received 8 clicks, all in the Themed campaign. We have an overall CTR of 1.34% and have spent $2.09 out of out $18 budget.

Afternoon shift by Kristen
At 1.30 we had received a total of 18 clicks, 5 in Weddings and 13 in Themed Cakes. Of the 10 new clicks, 5 of these were in Weddings and 5 in Themed. We had a CTR of 1.62%, increased from the morning, and have spent $6.01 of our $18 daily budget.

Evening shift by Ellie
Today we received a total of 45 clicks, 31 in Themed and 14 in Weddings. The overall CTR is 1.70%

The Themed budget was used by 7pm, so I increased it by $2.00 from our spare budget. At 10.30, I decreased the Themed budget $1.00 and the Weddings by $4.00. This means there is an extra $3.00 left over, as well as the $4 from yesterday, making a total of $7 spare budget to use as needed.

Working as a one!

Go home, sit on front of your computer, open your ECU email and find more than three emails with the subject: “Google Challenge, Campaign or Campaign Strategy ” on your inbox was something crazy, exciting and risky. It put to think us: “What we are doing? This project is going to be a big press for us”. We were wrong, Google challenge us and we accept the challenge!

After a couple of days we discovered that the Challenge is something fun... You have the opportunity to be creative and entrepreneur. However, to achieve the personals goals that motivated us to be part of the Google Challenge 2010 is important to have a team work. You should work as a one.

Be part a group and develop a good job is not an easy situation. However, if you know how to manage the different circumstances, work in a team can be really interesting activity where all member of the team learn about each other.

First of all, have a good communication is the key point to have a successful team work. Say what do you think and how do you feel is important to show your personality and star to know the personality of the others members of the team. Ice breaker is the principal step to get confident with the members of the group.

How we communicate each other?
To currently monitoring the campaign, we designed a time table, where each member of the group has a shift to look after the project (a person of the group has to be a guard during morning, afternoon or evening time).



Our contact is provided by mail, text messages and we had a couple of meetings. However, our principal media is email. We use to send at list 3 emails a day. Why? Because the guard, who is monitoring the campaign, has to write a couple of sentences where give a feedback of the shift.



With each email the guard has to attach the screenshot, at the end of he or she shift, taken from the Adwords administrator.

Absorbing results!

After analysed the strengths and weaknesses of our campaign, now we are on the process to absorb as many clicks, impressions and CTRs as possible. Is the last week and we are improving every day. We are trying to develop some new strategies to apply it on Friday to Sunday.

5 May 2010
Morning shift by Lucy
We had a good morning. We closed the morning shift with a total 12 clicks, 741 impressions, 1.62% and a total cost US$ 3.63. We received 8 clicks on Theme Cakes and 4 clicks on Wedding campaign.

Afternoon shift by Lucy
Was really good evening, we had 36 total clicks with, 1,809 impressions, 1,99% CTR and a cost of US$9.93. Themed Cakes campaign had 29 clicks and Wedding campaign received 7 clicks.

Evening shift by Ellie
We got 12 more clicks this evening, bringing our total up to 48 clicks today! We had 37 clicks in Themed and only 11 in Wedding. Our overall CTR wasn't as great as previous days, sitting at 1.66%.

With the budget I ended up putting an extra $1.50 from Weddings into Themed campaign as it reached end of budget early evening, and decreasing Wedding budget to $4.50. From this we have a spare $4.00 to help any campaigns that need in the next few days.

Increasing results

4 May 2010
Morning shift by Lucy
Well team I can’t sleep so I stared earning the monitoring. At 2 a.m. we have 2 clicks and they are on wedding campaign, with a total of 36 impressions, 5.56% CTR and a total cost of US$0.60. The clicks were on: Chocolate Bombonieres & Wedding Croquembouche.

On Themed Cakes Campaign we have any clicks and CTR, but we have 15 impression.

At the end of the morning shift we got a total of 7 clicks, 463 impressions and 1.52% CTR. We received 4 clicks on Theme Cakes (273 impressions, 1.47% CTR and total cost of US$1.00).
Wedding campaign had a total of 3 clicks, 190 impressions and 1.58% CTR with a total cost of US$1.61.

Team I made two reports, one is to see the placement of our keywords and the other one is a Ad Report, please have a look, maybe it will be help to give some ideas for the meeting today.

Afternoon shift by the team
We had 33 total clicks at the evening. We discussed about all our campaign and we did a general view of it. Also, we had a look at the budget and we changed it. We decided to put the weekend budget right down to $3 per campaign for Saturday and Sunday, and up todays, Thursday's and Friday’s budget higher. The table below highlight's the plan:

Week Three Weddings Themed Daily Total
Wednesday $10.00 $8.00 $18.00
Thursday $10.00 $8.00 $18.00
Friday $10.00 $8.00 $18.00
Saturday $3.00 $3.00 $6.00
Sunday $3.00 $3.00 $6.00
TOTAL $36.00 $30.00 $66.00

This has also left us with a spare $1.10 so we haven't gone over budget.

Evening shift by Thomas
I'm thrilled to say that we've received over 50 clicks today creating a new campaign record for our team. At around 9.40PM we've received 51 clicks and a CTR rate of 2.37%. Our budget currently stands at $16.23 out of our $17.80 budget that was increased this afternoon. The themed cakes campaign budget is pretty much maxed out for the day while there's enough money for a few more clicks on the wedding campaign.

Also attached is a campaign performance summary that I have briefly analysed, the graph shows a performance cycle of our campaign where the number of clicks decreases on the start of every weekend (Friday) then hitting rock bottom on Saturday before slowly recovering on Sunday to Monday (marked in red). The graph also shows that the campaign peaks on Monday as shown in green although the clicks are still increasing this week probably as a result of the budget increase. I think the performance pretty much reflects on the Monday - Friday business days and how people would rather do something else on a Friday evening/weekend than be in front of a computer.

Running with the time

With the past of the days our campaign is increasing. Clicks per day are going up, CTRs are up and impressions are up too. We are very happy with the results. However, is impossible do not feel anxious, is the last week of campaign and we have to give our best and try to rich our goals.

3 May 2010
Morning shift by Lucy
At the end of the morning shift we had a total of 13 clicks. 10 for Theme Cakes with 226 impressions 4.46% CTR and a cost total of US$2.21. (6 of the 10 clicks are on the ad about Engagement: Modern Engagement Cakes).

We had 3 clicks on wedding campaign with 1,99% impressions and 1.99& CTR. A total cost of US$1.39 (2 clicks on wedding cakes and 1 on Bombonieres).

Afternoon shift by Thomas
We have so far received a total of 28 clicks and spent $7.65 out of our $12.80 budget, I'm predicting that we will have a bit of excess by the end of today. Our themed cakes campaign is doing very well with a total of 20 clicks and a CTR rate of 3.24%, our wedding cakes campaign received 8 clicks and have a CTR rate of 1.28%.

I think we should discuss our budget and spending during tomorrow's meeting to ensure that we have used most if not all of our budget before the end of the campaign this week.

Evening shift by Thomas
At around 11.30PM we've received a pretty impressive total of 43 clicks with a relatively good CTR rate of 2.15 %, we've currently spent $12.40 out of our $12.80 budget leaving a few more cents for the last few minutes of the night. It is good to see that just over a third of our clicks was received during the evening time showing that clicks not only occur during the 9 to 5 business hours. We might even receive more clicks before the end of tonight.

Analysing results...

2 May 2010
Morning shift by Ellie
I'm sending you a slightly early report. This morning so far we've received 6 clicks, all in Themed and none in Weddings. However, our CTR overall is 2.48%, and this is because we haven't got many impressions, only approximately 250.

It is also interesting to note that the wedding ads average position is 4.4 today. We really need to work out a way we can increase the positions for these ads!

As I said before, we have a spare $5.00, so Kirsty can increase tonight's budget if we need to.

Afternoon shift by Kristen
For the afternoon shift we have received 8 more clicks (4 in Weddings, 4 in Themed Cakes). The Avg. Position of the Weddings Campaign improved from 4.6 to 3.3 during the course of the afternoon which is nice to see, hopefully it keeps increasing through the night so we can get more clicks. So far today we have a CTR of 1.52% and have spent $3.82 of our $10.00 budget. If we don't get more clicks by 9pm or so I will decrease the budget so we don't waste the remainder for today.

Evening shift by Kristen
Again not a great shift - this evening - Today we have received 19 clicks, 4 of these during the evening which is unusual - 1 in Weddings, 3 in Themed Cakes. Because of the poor performance I have decreased the Weddings budget from $6.00 to $4.00 for today. Ellie could you please adjust this back again in the morning? Today we have achieved a CTR of 1.37% (could be improved) and spent $4.55 of our now decreased $8.00 budget. Hopefully we get more clicks later this evening.

We do need to make some more improvements to the campaign to make the best use of our leftover budget - we still have over $100 to spend so we shouldn't be afraid to greatly increase our CPC, etc.

Ellie: Looking at yesterday, we received a total of 23 clicks, 17 in themed and 6 in Weddings. See attached screenshot.

As we have $7 spare dollars as well as the $90 budgeted for this week, I have changed today’s budget to
Themed - $5.80
Weddings - $7.00

Since this weekend was so bad for clicks I think its a shame we didn't increase budget more over long weekend- but since it was our first weekend, how were we meant to know that it might be more successful than a normal weekend?

I think we generally get more clicks during the week, so if any campaign budget reaches its limit during this week I think we should increase it by $1-2 and observe how it goes.

The last week started!

Well, it is time to give our best for the challenge. It is the last week of campaign and we have to develop more ideas and make a new plan to achieve our goals. This is a decisive week for the campaign, so we have to give the best effort and reassess our marketing plan, making it stronger, to finish with a flourish.

1 May 2010
Morning shift by Ellie
We have received 7 clicks this morning- 5 in Themed and 2 in Weddings. We have spent $1.70 out of our $10 budget and have an overall CTR of 1.66%.

Afternoon shift by Kristen
A very dismal afternoon in terms of clicks, we have only received 2 more - both in Themed Cakes (brining our total for the day to 9 so far). Our CTR has dropped to 1.21% and we have spent $2.08 of our daily budget. Ellie maybe you should decrease the budget before the end of the evening if we haven't received more clicks?

Evening shift by Ellie
We received a total of 15 clicks yesterday. At 10pm I decreased the budget to $3.00 Themed and $2.00 Weddings. Out of this $5.00 budget, we used up $3.60. We had 12 clicks in Themed campaign with CTR of 1.44%. In Weddings we got only 3 clicks with 0.58% CTR.

Today (Sunday) I have changed the budget again to $4.00 Themed and $6.00 Weddings. Kirsty, if it reaches budget today, you have a spare $5.00 to work with from yesterday, so you can increase it if needed.

The Challenge 2010: Improving results

The campaign is going well and the time is running. Our clients are happy with the project they believe that they are getting more customers thanks to the challenge. If the owner of Chocolate Art feels happy with the campaign we are happy too. If the client is satisfied with the services that mean that the team is doing a good job.

30 April 2010
Morning shift by Thomas
At the end of the morning shift we've received a total of 8 clicks (4 clicks for wedding and 4 clicks for themed cakes campaign). The CTR rate is currently at 2% and we've spent $2.27 out of our $6.75 budget. The ad for the bomboniers for the wedding campaign and the children cake ad is the most popular ad with 3 clicks each.

Afternoon shift by Kristen
So far today we have received 22 clicks, 11 in both campaigns and have achieved a CTR of 2.07%. The average ad position is 3.4 for Weddings and 2.4 for Themed Cakes, not too bad. So far we have spent $5.58 of our $6.75 daily budget.

Also, I went into Chocolate Art yesterday and spoke with Alicia. I printed out the campaign results so far to show her: she was very impressed with the almost 250 clicks received. I asked her about the enquiries records, and she could only give me vague results as she said it was very difficult to monitor and find out where people got the business name from (she said people still said from word of mouth but probably still looked them up on the internet first...). Although promising news: she said they were definitely receiving more telephone and email enquiries so the campaign must be working! She appreciated me stopping by and I said I'd be back next week to check in again.

Evening shift by Ellie
Last night weddings budget was maxed out while the themed budget had money left over. Weddings spent $3.80/$3.75, gained 12 clicks and a CTR of 1.98%. Themed spent $2.34/$3.00, had 13 clicks and a CTR of 1.32%. The overall CTR was 1.57%, the worst one we've had compared to the last few days.

This morning I have increased the budget to $4.00 for Themed and $6.00 for Weddings.

Tick Tock - Tick Tock: the time is running...

Well, the second week almost is over and we have to develop more strategies. The third week of campaign is coming and we have to give our best to have good results. The last part of this project is going to be difficult and stressful. For the moment we are keeping going and thinking about next week...

29 April 2010
Morning shift by Ellie
We have 12 clicks for this morning (up til 1pm), and an overall CTR of 2.32%. In Themed we've spent $1.11 out of $3.00 daily budget, with a CTR of 2.14%. In Weddings we've spent $2.23 out of $3.75, and have a CTR of 2.53%.

Afternoon shift by Lucy
We closed the afternoon with a total of 19 clicks, 406 impressions and 2.46% CTR. 10 clicks on theme cakes and 9 on wedding campaign.

Evening shift by Lucy
All the change that we had did are working!!
We closed the evening shift (12:05 am) with a total of 26 clicks, 1,249 impressions and 2.08% CTR. All these wit a total cost of US$6.51.

Theme cakes continues to lead campaigns with a total of 15 clicks, 696 impressions, 2.16% CTR and a total cost of US$2.88 We get 2 clicks on occasions campaign (on our new ads!!!! Cute Chocolate Cakes and Modern Engagement Cakes).

We are improving on wedding campaign. At the end we had a total of 11 clicks, 553 impressions, 2.16% CTR and a total cost of US$3.63. We got 3 clicks on our new ad!! (White Wedding Cakes), one in the Fancy Wedding Cakes and 5 one of we changed on our last meeting (A Memorable Wedding).

Freaky Challenge!!!

Google has challenged us and we accept the challenge! How we feel within the project? This is a question that every day we ask to our self and we proudly respond: "be involved in this project is somewhat addictive, but in a really strange way", Why? Because, we want to know all the time how we going, what keywords are not working, which ads are not getting clicks, how we can improve our campaigns? And is almost impossible answer all these questions every day. We send mails each other, at list, 3 times a day. our favorite topic of conversation are: Google Challenge, Chocolate Art (because a lot of people do not know that they make 3D cakes with chocolate) and how we and ECU are involved in it... These are some of our personal thinking:

Eleanor Cooksley
"The online campaign is teaching us so much relevant advertising information. It is showing us how relevant targeting particular markets is, and how different words can change the viewers perception of your product. I also never realised how hard it was to plan a budget, and how important it was to be able to have the flexibility to adjust it as required".

Kristen Brent

"I have found the campaign very interesting so far. It is exciting to see all our hard work put into practice and the campaign running live with people actually viewing and clicking on our ads. It's also great to see the learning experience evolve as we have optimised the campaign thus far to successfully increase our CTR and Average Ad Position for each of our campaigns".


Thomas Tanamas
"Over the first week of monitoring the Google AdWords campaign I have experienced and learnt a number of valuable new things. First of all the concept and importance of teamwork have been reinfoced in my learning, I can really see how team members can help each other and how well performing groups can really complete a whole range of tasks more effectively. Taking part in shift monitoring is very interesting and finding out how the campaign is going is always something that I look forward to.

Overall the GOMC has so far been a valuable learning experience for me, seeing how people react to our ads and doing ongoing improvements to make a better, more effective campaign is just fantastic experience. I also hope the campaign and our efforts so far can make a valuable contribution to our client".

Lucy Quiroz Gutiérrez

"To be part of this project is a really interesting for me because I’m learning. Log on into the Adwords account and see that every day more people clicks our ads motivates me to keep going. Is motivating see the results of our hard work. Also, try to forecast keywords, try to increase CTR and manage the money are some points that make our work attractive to me. I’m really positive and I believe that we are doing a good job!"

Team Work: Developing some marketing strategies

The campaign is running very well and we are really happy with the results. We are getting more clicks a day. Also, the impressions and CTR are increasing day by day. As result, we are more enthusiastic than before and we try to develop more strategies to improve our campaign. Build up good strategies is not a easy work, but we are working as a team, so more than one head think better that one!

28 April 2010
Morning shift by Lucy
At 7:15 we started with one click (Wedding campaign) and at the end of the shift we close with a total of 6 clicks. 5 clicks on themed cakes with 182 impressions and 2.75% of CTR and 1 click on wedding , 157 impressions and 0.64% CTR.

Afternoon shift by Kristen
This afternoon we have received 8 new clicks (3 in Weddings, 5 in Themed Cakes), bringing our total for the day so far to 14. Not bad! It's great to see our new/improved ads working - we have received 2 clicks for our "White Wedding Cakes" ad, and 1 for our "Modern Engagement Cakes Ad". It's also nice to see the clicks occurring in a wide range of ads including bombonieres and croquembouche.

So far today we have spent $3.49 of our $6.75 daily budget, and have achieved a staggering CTR of 1.99%, our best yet! So obviously the changes we made in terms of ads and keyword addition and removal are working. See attached screenshots comparing the start and end of shift.

Evening shift by Thomas
I think we should remove the Sporting theme ad under the Themed cakes campaign as reflected by today's results. Until this day the Sporting theme ad have received 0 clicks and only managed to have an impression rate of 27, when compared to the hundreds or even thousands of impressions made by the other ads. This fact alone would probably show that not many people are looking/searching for Sporting themed cakes online (all-time graph attached).

At the end of today (11.50PM), we've received a total of 26 clicks and a CTR rate of 2.02%, again we've pretty much used all of the daily budget, spending $6.55 out of $6.75. The themed cakes campaign is always doing very well, today it received 15 clicks and went over budget again. Just a thought, would it be worthwhile to make some budget changes and shift a bit of the money (even .50 cents or so) from the surplus Wedding campaign to get an extra click or two for the Themed cakes campaign? It just seems the Themed cakes campaign budget is always maxed out on a regular basis, it is also worthwhile to note that other than the fact we are getting more clicks on the Themed cakes campaign, the cost of each ad is considerably cheaper than the Wedding campaign, in competition sense it would mean we get more clicks (better score) for less, more bang for our back. Other than paying over 10 cents more for each Wedding cake ad, the CTR rate is also brought down by the Wedding cake campaign.

Ellie suggestion: Realistically thinking, I agree with you Thomas about pushing Themed cakes. However its massively important and we get marked on the fact that we keep true to the client's objectives. So I think its still really important that we stick with a bigger budget in weddings. We aren't losing very much of the budget lately either - 15 cents last night and nothing the night before. Hopefully the new wedding ads will bring in some more clicks as well, so we'll just have to wait and see!

Account change: I will delete the Sporting Adgroup this morning, as we all believe its not aiding the campaign.

The challenge is working...

Today we had a meeting and we did some change to improve our performances. Each member of the group is exited and is giving her/his best. During the meeting a lot of ideas were fluting on the paper! Now, we are more compromising and happy with the project, because we think that promote Chocolate Art is not that easy, because everybody ask: “What is chocolate art...? It is a picture with chocolate or it is candies shop”. However the result shows that we are doing a great job. We hope that you are involved in this as we are! If you want to know more about these challenge please have a look to this link: Google online marketing challenge.

27 April 2010
Morning shift by Lucy
We finish the morning time with a total of 6 clicks. 4 on Wedding campaign, with 173 impressions and 2.31% CTR (3 of the clicks were on wedding cakes on our ad: Fancy Wedding Cakes and 1 on Croquebouche on: Wedding Croquembouche). 2 clicks for Theme Cakes with 260 impressions and 0.77% CTR. We had spent a total of US $2.22.

Afternoon shift by the team
At 4:30 we had 16 clicks. During the meeting we did some important changes that are going to help to improve our performances. We changed two wedding ads, because we realised that they did not have the most important word for us “chocolate”, so we made better ads. Also we introduced a new ad that is more specific and attractive.

We deleted the occasion ads we had as they weren't gaining any impressions and created three new specific ones for baby showers, engagements and christening and baptisms. We will see how they go during the next few days, and if they have no success we may analyse again.

Moreover, we checked the key word list and we delete some of them because were to general and follow the Google guide, they suggest have a specific key words.

Evening shift by Thomas
There are no changes from my previous campaign update; the total amount of clicks at 23 clicks remains the same along with spending $6.85 out of $6.75. The themed cake campaign received 13 clicks with a relatively high CTR rate of 2.30% spending $2.99 out of $3.00. The wedding cake campaign received 10 clicks with a lower CTR rate of 1.57%, the wedding cake campaign for some reason is the campaign that went over budget spending a total of $3.86 out of the designated $3.75 daily budget.

Starting the second week!

In our next meeting we are going to look carefully to all our reports to know how we going, how the campaign is going, how many call Chocolate Art has received, how we are going with the budget, how we are going to spend the money that we have, change some key words and make some change to improve our campaign.

26 April 2010
Morning shift by Thomas
At the end of the Monday morning shift we received 8 clicks and used $2.50 of our $10.00 budget. The CTR is down from yesterday's 2.65% to this morning's 1.69%, the $10 budget for the day should be sufficient and we might even end up with a bit left because of today's public holiday.

Afternoon shift by Thomas
First of all I'm very surprised with the results we have received so far, although today is a public holiday we've received a total of 25 clicks and spent $8.90 from the day's $10.00 budget, Kirsty you might need to keep a close eye on the budget during your evening shift. We've pretty much used the entire budget for the Themed cakes campaign receiving 13 clicks and spending $3.84 out of the $4.00 budget. Our overall CTR rate today at 2.18% is still lower than yesterday’s 2.65%, but we will probably be getting more clicks by the end of today.

Evening shift by Kirsten
A very successful evening for the campaign! A total of 35 clicks today, 12 of these during the evening shift (8 in Weddings, 4 in Themed Cakes). We have also achieved a high CTR for both campaigns today (2.11% for Weddings, 2.33% for Themed Cakes). It's nice to see the Weddings campaign doing almost as well as Themed considering that's where the clients wish to place the main focus. Our average position for each campaign has also gone down today which is great, it's now 2.5 for Weddings and 2 for Themed which is obviously helping improve our CTR.

We have almost maxed out our budget for each campaign (Spent $6.83/$7.00 for Weddings, $4.83/$5.00 for Themed Cakes). However I think we should leave the budget as is seeing as we normally don't receive a lot of traffic after 10pm or so based on last week’s data. And this way we will have more money to spend once the campaigns fully optimised. Also in terms of improving our campaign there are some ads and keywords which have not received any clicks so far that we can consider removing. We will discuss this further at tomorrow's meeting.

First week of campaign: OVER

We have a week currently monitoring our campaign and the News each day is better. It was a successful week and interesting, because at the end clicks increased more than expected. We have two weeks more to go, and the work have to increase with the past of the days. During this period will continue to permanent monitoring and creating new marketing strategies to optimize our campaign.

25 April 2010
Morning shift by Lucy
We started the morning with 2 clicks one for theme and for wedding. At the end of the morning shift, we have a total of 8 clicks, 176 impressions and 4.55% CTR.

Wedding campaign had just 2 clicks with 91 impressions and 2.20% of CTR. Theme Cakes has 6 clicks, 85 impressions and 7.06% CTR (one click was for children and the others was on birthday).

Evening shift by Lucy
At the end of the shift we had a total of 11 clicks, with a total of 464 impressions and 2.37% CTR. Wedding had 4 clicks, 251 impressions and 1.59% CTR with a total of US$1.39. Themed Cakes had 7 clicks, 213 impressions and 3.29% CTR with a total of US$0.27.

I attached and excel document that I created with the Adwords tool, please have a look. It is pretty interesting. Also, in our account you can see all the reports, for the moment we have tree (Account Report, Ad performance and Placement/Keyword Report). The plan is make it every 7 days. Please if you have a suggestion let me know!

Evening shift by Thomas
This report concludes our first week of the campaign. At the end of the evening shift we have a total of 26 clicks and a total CTR rate of 2.65%.

We did not max out the budget today, spending only $6.85 out of $7.50. It is interesting to know that although the number of clicks did not necessarily decrease from the previous weekdays we're able to spend less because the average CPC is lower than the weekday average, today's average CPC is only $0.23 for themed cakes and $0.33 for wedding cakes. We've also definitely improved our CTR rate today.

One week!

After make some changes, try to created attractive ads and check our account on Google Adword, we have one week running the campaign. All that stuff has been so exciting. With the pass of the days we want add more things, make new strategies, surf into our account, apply all the tools that Google has and we are more integrated as a team. Great experiences, which we are enjoying!!

24 April 2010
Morning shift by Ellie
Clicks for this morning have been quite dismal. Only two clicks on the "Make a statement" birthday ad, no clicks on weddings at all, with a current overall CTR of 0.68% for 295 impressions. The budget for wedding was due to go up today, but I have not increased it due to this morning’s results. Lucy, if clicks for weddings increase and reach the limit, you can increase it by $1.10. If we have not received many clicks by my evening shift tonight, I might decrease the budget so we can roll some over - possibly to a more successful weekday.

Kirsty, how did you say we can improve ad placement for weddings ads?? We might have to do this, as the placements aren't that great and this is the main area we need to improve.

I have also been examining our ads, and have made a list of the last several days and how many clicks we've had for each ad:

"Make a statement" birthday ad - 41
"Fancy wedding cakes" ad - 16
"Kids birthday cakes" - 8
"Dazzling wedding cakes" - 4
"Chocolate bombonieres" - 4
"Wedding bombonieres" - 4
"Funky birthday cakes" - 3
"A Memorable Wedding" - 3
"3D birthday cakes" - 1
Both croquembouch ads - 1 each

Looking at this list, we have received no clicks for occasion or sporting ads.
I think we should look again at the ads and see if there is anywhere we can change and add new words, as that gets lots of clicks with our "Fancy Wedding cakes" ad, or see if there is any other way we can improve or change the ads getting 1-4 clicks only. I don't expect we will get any hits for sporting, but we might be able to improve our occasions ads as well and get some clicks. However, having the ads there aren't costing us any money or even many impressions.


Afternoon Shift by Lucy
Clicks during the afternoon have been pretty gloomy. We received a total of 5 clicks for the evening. (1 clicks in Weddings and 4 in Themed Cakes). We got a CTR of 0.71% in Weddings and 0.81% in Themed Cakes. It had declined… I was expecting more clicks and CTRs, maybe it will increase at night time.

The 4 click in (Theme campaign) were in Birthday and on the same ad (Birthday Cakes - Make a statement at your 18th, 21st, 30th and more!...). For the wedding campaign the click was in Wedding Cakes mil and white chocolate.

For the moment we have in total 0.78% CTR and 642 impressions and we had spend just US$0.35.
Hey to improve our ads I think we have to find the way to put the word “whit” in most of them… Should be helpful

Evening Shift by Ellie
We have had a total of 17 clicks today. 11 in Themed campaign (9 birthday, 2 children) with a CTR of 1.13% and 6 in Wedding campaign with 1.97% CTR. This gives an overall CTR of 1.33%. If we get more clicks tomorrow and reach budget, Themed can be increased $0.50 and Wedding can be increased $1.50.

Account change!

Ellie: This morning I have changed the following Account details:
* Deleted Corporate Campaign
* Changed Weddings to Search network only
* Changed budget of campaigns to $4 each for 23/4
* Increased max CPC - Weddings from $0.50 to $0.60/click and Themed from $0.30 to $0.40/click.

Let's hope weekend traffic is good!

Friday 23 April 2010
Morning shift by Lucy
Well team I think that all changes that we had made are working. At 7:50 a.m. we have 3.23% of CTR. 1 click on Wedding cakes and 1 on Theme Cakes.

At 9:15 a.m. we had more CTR in wedding campaign (5.71%). On our new ad we have 2 clicks!. For Theme Cakes we had more impression than on wedding (Theme cakes 69 – Wedding 35) and just one click. At the end of the shift today we had a total of 7 clicks. 4 clicks for Theme cakes with an impression of 187 and 2.14% of CTR (again we are at the limited of our budget). In wedding campaign we have a total of 3 clicks with 74 impressions and 4.05% of CTR.

Hey team I’m thinking that in sporting cakes, we hadn´t had any click, impression or CTR, maybe we should delete it?? I don’t know if it’s good idea, just was a thought that I would like to share with you.

Afternoon shift by Kristen
So far today we have received a total of 13 clicks, 4 in the Weddings Campaign and 9 in Themed Cakes. The specific ads that our clicks have occurred in are our make a statement birthday ad (6 clicks, 2.29% CTR), kid's birthday cakes ad (2 clicks, 2.06% CTR), fancy wedding cakes (2 clicks, 2.35% CTR), wedding bombonieres (1 click, 2.13% CTR) and wedding croquembouch (1 click, amazingly high 20% CTR).

The higher budget and no content search seems to be working: our average position for weddings is 4 (which I think we could improve, maybe by using manual bidding?) and 2.3 for Themed Cakes which is quite good. We have spent $3.11 of our increased $8.00 daily budget. Overall things are running smoothly today.

I will continue to monitor the campaign throughout my evening shift tonight and email you at the end of the day with more results. Please find attached some screenshots for the afternoon shift.

Evening shift by Kristen
We received a total of 21 clicks yesterday, 8 (2 in Weddings, 6 in Themed Cakes) of these were during the evening period. We achieved a CTR of 1.52% in Weddings and 1.51% in Themed Cakes. I think removing the content network for both campaigns is working as our clicks have not declined much and we now have a much higher CTR and Avg. Position (3.7 for Weddings which I think we can still improve, and 2.2 for Themed Cakes).

AI thinks we should also make use of the Reports tool on AdWords to do more detailed tracking and analysis of the account. I might have a play around with this today and see what kind of results we get. Over to you Lucy!

The guard...

Today Thomas had a marathon… The boy of the team was who did the entire shifted for the day! So far we are having good results. It is our 4 day running the campaign and we are very excited and compromised with the project.

Thursday 22 April 2010
Morning shift by Thomas
This is my first report out of today's 3 marathon shift. At around 12.20PM, we have so far received a total of 9 clicks a CTR of 0.52% and we've used over 1/3 of our daily budget at $2.90. Next to the Themed Cakes campaign overview, I've noticed a message that says (Limited by budget) and according to the message we could receive 238% more clicks by increasing our daily budget. But I don't think we could afford increasing our daily budget to the amount Google recommends.


Afternoon shift by Thomas
Just a quick message! To let you know that we've pretty much hit our maximum budget for the day. A total of 12 hits for the Themed cakes campaign at $3.84 and a total of 9 hits for the Wedding campaign at $3.39. The CTR rate is at 0.63%, the CTR, impression and click rate for the corporate campaign is 0, so there's been no traffic or searches for Corporate cakes today. Unless a person will be clicking on the Corporate cake ad, there will be no other clicks for the rest of the night.

As mentioned by Ellie's earlier report we now have reached our maximum budget for our Wedding campaign at 9 clicks, the Themed cakes campaign will reach the daily budget after probably 1 more click while there's been zero hits on the Corporate campaign. I will let you know if there are any further changes tonight as we are relatively close to our budget, currently at 6.26PM we are sitting on a total of 20 clicks (almost doubling our previous days). There's a good possibility that we will max out our budget before the end of the night, please let me know if should be paying attention to anything in particular.

Evening shift by Thomas
This is my third and final summary for today. A total of 22 clicks and a CTR rate of 0.66%. We've pretty much used up our daily budget, spending $7.36 so far. I don't know whether the Corporate campaign should be of concern to us, but we did not receive a single hit on this particular campaign today. As Lucy mentioned earlier there's still room for ad optimisation as Google suggests that we are missing out on around 50 possible clicks, again this issue revolves around our budget and I don't think we can afford and match their recommendations 100%. I will definitely try and study these details and suggestions tomorrow.

Third day of campaign!

We are thinking to make some changes. A long weekend is coming and we think that during that period we are going to have a high traffic. Also, we are thinking for next week delete one of our campaign, because is one of the less important and we are losing money on it. Our principal campaign is wedding; the clients want to be a big focus on that one. We are develop some strategies make strong wedding campaign.

Wednesday 21 April 2010
Morning shift by Ellie
This morning we've had four clicks, three in birthdays (all on the "make a statement" ad) and one on our new wedding ad. CTR is high for birthdays, and low for weddings. This is possibly due to birthday ads only displayed through Google search network, whereas weddings are through search and content networks. Please see attached screen shots.

Afternoon shift by Kirsten
At the end of the afternoon we had 11 clicks, most on our birthday ad and our new milk & white chocolate wedding ad. We were on track for our budget settings and attracting a much higher CTR for Themed Cakes compared to Wedding Cakes (due to Weddings still using both Search & Content networks). Attached are screenshots from the beginning and middle of the shift.

Evening shift by Ellie
We have had 16 clicks tonight, 6 on Weddings and 10 on Themed (birthdays). Even though I'm concerned with impressions we're getting through the content network in Weddings, 5 out of the 6 clicks received came from the content network today. I'm wondering if we will get more clicks through the search network if we increase maximum CPC - we can see how it goes over the long weekend. After seeing results this weekend, we should probably review the content network for weddings - for even though it decreases CTR, its possibly more in line with client objectives to expand weddings in general. Something to think about anyway!

As well as the screen shots, I have also attached a daily budget for each campaign. Because we want to increase budget over the weekend I have had to make the week one budget a bit higher. This means that week one and two are relatively equal, with the most still dedicated to the third week. I have also increased all weekend budgets compared with week days to be prepared for extra weekend traffic.

The campaign is running!

Today we were so enthusiastic with our campaign. We believe that we are doing well. Each of the members of the group has fulfilled the tasks assigned. We are very excited about this project and we are giving our best to meet a good role within the challenge and let up the name of the university.

Tuesday 20 April 2010
Morning shift by Lucy:
Good morning!
Is 7 a.m. on the morning and we have 1 click and it had spend US$0.41. The click was in Theme Cakes (birthday cake). At the end of the morning shift (12:00) we had just one click in birthday cakes. I think, if until the meeting today, we don’t get more clicks, we have to change some ads and also the key words (see Kristen document, there are some really good key works).Please find attach with the screens (start and end of the shift).

Afternoon shift by the Team:
At 4:20 p.m. we had 13 clicks. The most clicked campaign was birthday. As result, we decided change some key words that were so general and applied some more specific. Also, we tried to make some improvements in Wedding campaigns. The meeting was really productive because we have more clear the project and our goals.

Evening shift by Thomas:
Attached is a screen shot of the AdWords account at 10.30 PM. We have so far received the same amount of clicks from yesterday but we are spending less today. CTR wise we did better yesterday at 0.54% when compared to today's 0.49% so far.

Note: If you would like to know a little bit more about what is Google Challenge and how ECU is participating in it? Please have a look here: ECU Communications & Arts

The campaign began!

We started the campaign of Chocolate Art yesterday. We are going to monitoring the campaign for 3 weeks; we made a live campaign monitoring schedule. Follow us in our “journal”, we are learning from it...

Monday 19 April 2010
Morning shift by Ellie:
I have started off our campaign at 2.30am (just because I was awake and couldn't sleep). We have had a lot of impressions for birthdays and weddings (mainly croquembouche), however have only had 6 clicks. These clicks were all on the birthday ad about the 18th, 21sts etc. We have had NO clicks on wedding yet, and if this continues, we will need to change something!! Also, no clicks from the content network yet, only from the search network...However the content network is getting a LOT of impressions.

Afternoon Shift by Thomas:
At the end of the afternoon shift we currently have a total of 9 clicks. I think this is not bad and probably just about right where we are not running out of money too quickly or getting too little response from the general public. During tomorrow's meeting I would like to recommend that we go through the ads one more time to make sure that we are really optimising the ads and the character limit, just for an example for the birthday cake ad, I saw a ".." being used to fill the spaces on the first description line.

Evening shift by Kristen:
We now have 12 clicks, and have spent $4.74 of our daily budget. Please also find attached a list of suggested keyword changes I think we should implement at tomorrow's meeting. I found most of these on the "Opportunities" page of the account, and hopefully these specific keywords will target our audience better.

Chocolate Art

If you are a lover of Chocolate and the art, we know the perfect place to makes the cake of your dreams: Chocolate Art, design unique and individual wedding, birthday and special cakes. Any request or idea is achievable, their just want to create amazing cakes with flexible planning and professional finishes.

Chocolate Art is a small business family in Perth, Western Australia. The speciality of this shop is that they create and unique cakes with chocolate and each product are handmade. You can explore the perfect balance between taste and Art.

Each cake is original, because Brett Coddington makes all the figures with his hands to build an amazing and luxury cake.

Make the different and you can do of you birthday, party, or marriage a special day.
www.chocolateart.com.au

A little bit about us!

My name is Ellie Cooksley and I am currently completing a Graduate Diploma in Business: Event Management. I love spending time with my 3 year old son and enjoy pursuing creative activities such as scrapbooking, writing, reading and attending local festivals and events.

My name is Kirsty Brent, I am 21 years old and studying a Master of Professional Marketing. My hobbies include digital media (graphic design, web design, photography, film & video), shopping and reading. My interests include animals, computers and travel, especially within the USA.

My name is Thomas A. Tanamas and I've been living in Australia for most of my life. This is my second year at Uni and I will be majoring in Marketing. I am 19 years old and some of my hobbies include pets, looking after my dog and also the planted aquarium. I enjoy technology and have a keen interest with gadgets of all sorts. I also love my TV and a bit of recreational shooting (not hunting) every now and then.

My name is Lucy Quiroz Gutiérrez, from Colombia; I am a Social Communicator – Journalist, studying a Master of Professional Marketing and I have been living in Australia for almost 2 years. I enjoy writing and I had worked as a coordinator in a website (www.goguiadelocio.com.co)where I had to write a lot, I worked as a redactor in Terra (www.terra.com.co). I Love dancing, I believe that music is life and happiness, also I really like cooking.