Daehee Park's Page

Earlier this week, our team from Penn State University (AMERICAS Winner) finally flew out to San Francisco to visit Google's headquarters. Present were teams from University of Western Australia (Global Winner), James Madison University (Finalist), and Boise State University (Finalist). For an overview of the Googleplex trip experience, check out the posts on my personal blog:

• Googleplex Trip: Day 1

… Continue

As our team is closing in on the final week of the campaign, we adjusted our budgets to make sure we spend the rest of our allocated $200.

What we have learned so far from our campaign:

• Negative keywords are a lifesaver when it comes to click-through rates. But sometimes you just have to trash a keyword if it's too general because you'll never generate enough negatives.


• Take advantage of dynamic keyword insertion. This has generally been able to DOUBLE our click-through-rates

… Continue

After monitoring our campaigns for the past couple of days and deleting keywords with low CTR's, our overall account CTR is up to about 2.5% today. This is a huge improvement since our first day with a 0.5% CTR. Our best performing campaign is up to a 4.4% CTR.

However, we are flying slightly under our allocated budget, which is not a huge problem since we can crank up the budgets in the following days and make up for lost clicks.

Additionally, we had to pause an ad group about the Penn State… Continue

We launched on March 27th as soon as the $200 was credited to our account. The account was activated at 6am and we launched at 8am. Within an hour of launching, some of our keywords generated 300-3,000 impressions.

These were obviously broad, general keywords that were showing up on mostly irrelevant searches. So I went into Adwords Editor and deleted many of these crazy keywords. This destroyed our overall CTR for the first day, but this is expected for a fresh campaign. We will be madly optim… Continue

I am going to start updating my own blog on Gomcha.com about our team's progress in the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Because this is a competition where the winner is announced only after months of action, real-time reporting like this should be interesting to the spectators. I am the team leader for Team Big Click at Penn State University and the creator of Gomcha.com. I encourage other teams to take the same approach.

You guys may not want to reveal what's going on in your own campaigns… Continue