Learnings from GOMCHA

Three weeks, tons of opinions, thousands of impressions , hundreds of clicks and inestimable amount of knowledge gained is what we can summarize our Google Online Marketing Campaign which ended on 11th of March 2011.

Though the click rate curve kept going up and down during the 21 days of campaign our learning curve kept growing exponentially throughout the campaign. GOMCHA gave a whole new perspective of web analytics and online marketing campaign.

Some of the mistakes we did during our campaign are:

1. We had to discuss about the offers in advance with our client and felt we were a little late in doing so.

2. Additional keyword research could have helped us more in improving our CTR.

Learnings from the campaign:

1. Pre-plan and set clear time frame for the offers that will be put up as part of marketing campaign.

2. Monitor keywords performance continuously.

3. Make use of multiple metrics in effectively devising and improving marketing strategies.

4. Identify the right network partner where the ads will be displayed

We really thank Dr. Sudha Ram, our professor who gave us an opportunity to participate in this event. Her inputs were always a plus point in improving our campaign. We also thank our client, Ms. Nicole Flowers of 47Scott as without her support this event would have never been fruitful for us.

This is what each team member of BizIntellect had to say about their GOMCHA experience:

  

Shalini : "GOMCHA was a different experience altogether ! I was able to gain good insight into client business and online marketing. Involved some real creativity and lots of experimentation.Improved my learning curve completely."

 

 Mithun : "GOMC was truly a new learning experience for me as I discovered the great potential of online marketing campaign which is so easy and cost effective compared to conventional approach of paper advertizing. Web analytics and adwords further helped me gain a deep insight on measuring the KPI's for effective website design and SEM optimization techniques."

  Arpitha: 

"Gomcha was an enjoyable experience, which gave me a new perspective to online marketing and analytics. It showed me how tiny details like noticing the way users use the website, the words used in advertisements makes a huge difference to the number of customers we attract. Learn while having fun, is how I would remember Gomcha."

Finally its me, Deepak and it was pleasure leading BizIntellect team in this GOMC project. This project was an exhilarating experience which taught me how critical it is to understand a business and then devise strategy to improve the business. The project was also an enlightening experience of the analytics world and definitely helped me hone my business acumen.

Gomcha Experience

21 days, 99.6% of the budget spent, 299 conversions, lots of learnings about google analytics – This was how our campaign ended for us after 3 weeks of a roller coaster ride..

It all started with the client hunt. You can see us with our client here. Once we zeroed in on the client, we started working on the pre-campaign report. We did some ground work to learn about our client’s existing marketing situation. Once we got to know about the  details such as the most famous dish, what customers usually look for in our restaurant, we started designing our strategy. We brainstormed on several ad-groups, and worked on broad keywords as well as long tail keywords.

Our first week was an experimental week, where we spent little, and wanted to see the trend. We concentrated on eliminating the low performance keywords. We also altered the ads that were not doing great. In the first week, one of the ads we designed to target visitors for the rodeo event in Tucson worked extremely well. The second week we started eliminating the low performance keywords and focused on increasing the CTR. The third week we increased our budget. With the increase in budget, we could improve the ad-position for a few highly sought after keywords, getting us more conversions.

The whole experience was an eye opener to us, giving us a new perspective to online marketing. We all learnt how various metrics from google analytics like the number of visitors, unique visitors, source of traffic,etc .can help us optimize our strategy and  ficus our ads at relevant customers. Gomcha has helped us gain real-world  marketing experience and hone our business acumen.

Final Week of Campaign !!!

At the end of second week our campaigns had been performing very well. Before entering the third week, our team came up with a strategy of concentrating more on conversions, Hence all our campaigns were tailored to attract more clicks eventually leading to conversions.

The competition was increasing with other contenders, as they had realized that we were new in the adwords marketing and they started increasing the bids to remain #1 in the ad position. We decided to set "Auto-Bid" option to all our keywords. Since the second week was regulated well we did not spend extravagantly. We had sufficient funds remaining in our account.

Overall Week-3 was a success, We managed to get 92 clicks with 72 Conversions compared to last week's 118 clicks with 106 conversions. Our client Nicole, spoke to us and told that she had more than twenty customers coming up with the coupons to redeem at the restaurant. All our efforts of optimizing the keywords, adjusting the budget/bids worked out pretty well, as our marketing campaign ended with fruitful results.

Week 2 of GOMCHA draws to a close

Well end of week#2 of GOMCHA and we heard good news from Nicole Flowers , owner 47 Scott. As on 03/04 , we had 11 coupons coming in to 47Scott. All thanks to Google Ads ! :) So what did we do to make GOMCHA so much more meaningful.Well we are going to share some small insight about how we managed the campaigns. The Sunday before we started our campaigns we decided to bring in some transparency and accountablity to our campaigns. What started as a better team management strategy served us well in getting some meaning from GOMCHA itself.

We decided to bring in 4 campaigns:
1.Campaign KickStart ----> this one focused on 47Scott's regular patrons---> Deepak managed this.
2.Exclusive -----> this one focused on people who were looking for ongoing events in Tucson---->Mithun managed this.
3.Menu Delight------> this one focused on people who were looking for Dinner , Lunch and Coffee specifically.---->Arpitha managed this.
4.Up Against Rivals----->this one focused on people who were looking for 47Scott's competitors------>Shalini managed this.

What started as a technique to manage the camapigns better , led us to clustering keywords; each keyword cluster targetting an audience we never even thought of when we came up with our keyword groups before we started our camapigns. Of course , there were flip sides . We saw that few keywords in the clusters overlapped. Once we eliminated the overlapping words ,our ads began to show up for various keyword searches. Initially we never started all our camapigns at the same time. But by the first wednesday all our campaigns were up and running. Needless to say optimization of keywords and wise bidding choices only helped us do better, fetching more conversions. As of today thats how our Ad Words dashboard looks like .

In hindsight we were trying to segment , position and target principle - a core marketing concept and it really worked well for us complementing the goals that we designed for GOMCHA. We look forward to a grand finale to the GOMCHA!!!

Second Half of First Week

By the fifth day of the campaign we had gained a fair insight of the search philosophy. We decided to run all our Campaigns in parallel at different times of the day and covering all geographies inside united states. Each of our Campaigns were designed to target specific audience. Our idea of cashing on the Local event turned out to be very successful, Since we observed a sudden increase in the number of impressions, conversions and clicks.

The sixth day saw a further increase in the number of impressions and clicks as two of our campaigns namely “Campaign KickStart” and “Exclusive” had caught up momentum. Since the impressions were quickly increasing, we foresaw a threat of CTR dropping to low percentages. We decided to overcome this overhead by pausing the campaigns during nights and switching back the geography settings to “Arizona” state alone.

The seventh day of our Campaign was well regulated as we concentrated on increasing the CTR and kept a close tab on the budget as we had ended up spending 27.9% of our $200 budget which accounted to $55. So far the journey has been overwhelming and eventful. Enjoying every day of the Campaign, Experimenting & Implementing new ideas in the versatile market...

AdWords Journey so far!!

We started our campaign on a Sunday, 20th Feb. Initially we ran only one campaign. As our restaurant is closed on Sundays , we suspected any user activity on our website. But we were not disappointed at the end of first day as we got a click!! A good start indeed:)

Second day also we got one click. But our Ad impressions were not that high. So we decided to start couple of more campaigns simultaneously. This gave us the expected impressions.

Third day we increased the bid rates for our keywords and also ran our Ads throughout US as against running only in Arizona. This resulted in more impressions and we got 4 clicks.So at the end of third day we brainstormed and designed few more Ads and keywords to be started on fourth day.

Fourth day was very eventful in our Adwords journey!! Till evening we just had three clicks. But in the evening we started a new Adgroup hoping to cash on some local event. Just after two hours of launching this Adgroup we got 13 clicks !!! The day ended with 22 clicks increasing our total tally to 28 and the cumulative impressions approximately 7000.

Going forward we will try to keep a limit on the impressions but focus on increasing the clicks so that our CTR is good. Till now we have spent approximately $10 across 4 days.

More updates to follow......

Kick-starting the campaign

Now that the pre-campaign report is ready, we are all set to kickstart the campaign. Choosing the wordings for the google ad was fun. To think of a catchy line to explain the restaurant, describe the offer and also to ask the viewers to download the coupon, all in just 3 lines - about 5 words per line, was a good exercise to bring out our creative best.

We also met up with our client, Nicole and discussed about marketing with her. She has been very co- operative and equally excited about online marketing. 47scott now offers a free dessert with entrees. So now, all of you reading- this do google for 47 Scott, get the coupon from our website and grab the free dessert ;)

How to chose Keywords (Wisely !!)

We have been doing our bit for the GOMCHA Pre-Campaign Report. Lots of work into getting the necessary data, later transforming that data and then getting the data organized. It’s been good though considering our team understood what the client is looking to have and what in turn we can give to help us meet the client expectations. As we near the campaign it gets tougher and trickier, because we have to quantify our client’s needs and our expectations from the campaign in terms of metrics like Cost per Click (CPC), Click through Rate (CTR) and so on. It is in this quantification process that we are at times (No!!Most times), grappling our way through. However what determines all these metrics – the keywords. The right combination of the keywords makes a successful ad. This piece here is to help understand the process of short listing and making a good set of keywords. We will take an example; say we would like to buy a “Dachshund Puppy”. If we were to looking to buy a dachshund puppy how would we search for one? So this is the stage where in we are looking to mimic a user’s action that could pull up our ad. So this is how we construct our keyword “dachshund puppies for sale in Tucson”. Typically commonly misspelled search words form great keywords. Or also using abbreviations and alternative spellings to regular spelling is a great way. However at this stage it is very easy to get lost. We could end up having very generic, broad keywords that might not give users the kind of results that they want to see. Neither does this anything to pull up our ad.
Sample the two search results that have almost the same search query. One pulls more Ads since it is generic while the other weed out ads as the search string is location specific.

To help with this task is the Keywords Tool that is available as a part of Google AdWords that could help advertisers design keywords that attract visitors through organic searches. Also another interesting tool would be the Search Terms tool. This report gives a comparative study between relevant keywords users use and the redundant keywords that advertisers should eliminate. The other thing that advertisers could do is to match their keywords to the 4 genres namely – negative, broad, exact and phrase. This classification could again give insight as to what keywords fall into what category. This could also help the advertiser measure the performance of the keywords. Watch out for our next post on Pre Campaign jitters.

Pre-campaign Story

In order to collect the details for our Pre-Campaign report our team met with Nicole Flowers at the restaurant premises. Our main agenda was to gather the following details which would help us analyze the website and help in online marketing.

We gathered information about the Business Model, USP, Which day most Customers visit?. We also asked about who their Customers are?, so than we can plan a strategy to target different section of the customer base.

47SCOTT does not carry out any online marketing campaign at present. It is covered by the local radio and newspaper media. They also participate in the Radio and TV shows.

Our client has a Facebook Page, which has 522 users and they use this as an effective media to attract customers by posting the hot offers and deals. They are also having plans of linking the Facebook page with Yelp in the near future.

Going forward

We started to look into the requirements of the pre-campaign report of the GOMC competition. This report basically expects us to know the in and out of our client's business, competitors, USP and lot more. This was the right time for us to meet out client and have a lengthy discussion to better understand their business and the revenue model.

Our client agreed to spend some of her time with us in spite of her busy schedule at the restaurant. Once we met our client we slowly went on with our exhaustive list of questions and got descriptive answers to them!

At the end of the meet , we had enough information to start a restaurant ourself ;)

Playing with analytics

Two weeks from when we were introduced to Gomcha, and quite an experience so far. A lot of learning about analytics and marketing.

At present, we are learning to explore and figure out how we can use various metrics to better market our client.

We get information about:

-Different countries that people visit from

-Whether it is the same people that visit over and over

-What pages and information most people prefer to see

- How long they usually stay on the website

- If there are other sites that these users come from

We use above information and such many other analytics to create a much better marketing strategy. We can know whom to concentrate on, what they like to see, what we can improve and so on. The team is enjoying the "exploration" phase and our excitement is only increasing as we are learning more and learning a completely new dimension to marketing.

Google Analytics (GA) embedding in the Client Website

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Our client has agreed to plug in the code for the google analytics in the website http://www.47scott.com/.

We have successfully installed the google Analytics in the code and are able to view the statistics for the hosting site. We have tested it successfully by noting the increase in the number of hits in the GA dashboard as and when the site is viewed by anyone.

Our Client

Our client has been finalized and they are very much eager to work with us on the Google Adwords Campaign. We will do our best to carry out a successful campaign for our esteemed client.

About the Client

Client Name: 47SCOTT - A restaurant based in Tucson.
Website: http://www.47scott.com

47SCOTT is an American bistro in Downtown Tucson featuring modern American comfort food, eclectic wines, micro-brewed beers and hand-crafted cocktails. 47SCOTT focusses on excellent service and products in an urban, comfortable décor with bar and booth seating, and a large outdoor brick patio. All in all, a nice, quiet restaurant with delicious food and impressive ambience.

GOMCHA- An Insight

Well to start off with GOMCHA stands for Google Online Marketing Challenge .... an annual competiton conducted by Google that encourages students to participate in an online marketing challenge. Students create a marketing campaign using Google Adwords for a local business or an NGO and the success of this campaign determines their success in GOMCHA. The choice of the NGO or the small business is bound by ground rules established by Google.
More information about the Challenge is available at this link :
http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/about.html

Most of us at this juncture would be quite familiar with GOMCHA as such , but a lot of thought needs to get into Google AdWords . So what is Google AdWords ?
Well its the success of the AdWords campaign that makes or breaks the deal. Well often when we search for something on Google , we see ads that are populated on the right side of the search result window, well those are the ads that are brought up by Google AdWords. For instance , let us try searching for Parrot Cages in google and results that come on the right like BirdCages4Less and Parrot Bird cages all fall into the Adword category.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDRd9JWfN1s&feature=player_embedded

Now the business we choose should benefit from the Google Adwords campaign . If visible increase in clientele for the business can be percieved by Google the campaign has been effective, Of course , here again the success of the campaign is defined by Google.
http://www.google.com/onlinechallenge/student_guides.html

GOMCHA-The beginning!

Biz-Intellect as we decided to call our team as, is all set and excited to participate in the Google Online Marketing Challenge (referred to as GOMCHA or GOMC). The participation in this competition is part of our coursework (MIS 587 Business Intelligence).
Everyone in the team being new to the world of analytics are ecstatic about this event.
The client finalizing part is being done and we will be back with updates soon!


-Biz-Intellect Team
Deepak Seethur
Arpitha Srinathan
Shalini Sasidharan
Mithun Satyakumar