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).