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.