Day 1-5

Eight o'clock Thursday morning, the 1st of May, saw the launch of team Bee Heard's Google AdWords campaign. After reading all the material provided for the challenge and several meetings and phone calls with our local business, we felt confident that we had put together a strong pre-campaign strategy.

A couple of hours after our campaign was set active our first results showed up in the campaign manager. We were surprised to see that in such a short space of time our 3 Ad Groups had collectively achieved a few thousand impressions. However, for those few thousand impressions, we only managed to obtain 5 clicks. We decided to run our campaign on an inflated daily budget for the first day as we expected that our inclusion of several broad keywords would result in a high number of impressions and therefore clicks. Despite the fact that the keyword tool provides the average search volume and average competition for each keyword, we wanted to see results that we could control. The results at the completion of day 1 confirmed our expectations. The keywords we considered to be broad were generating the high number of impressions and were not obtaining significant clicks. Summary of Day 1: 17,910 impressions, 30 clicks, 0.16% CTR.

Before the start of day two (I note a separation between days because our campaign is effectively paused when we meet our daily budget) we removed most of the broad keywords and adjusted our daily budget to a sustainable level. The changes resulted in a significant decrease in impressions while maintaining the same number of clicks (the maximum our budget allows for). Summary of Day 2: 10,136 impressions, 30 clicks, 0.29% CTR.

Removing further keywords and changing the preferred CPC on keywords with a low quality score saw a further decrease in the number of impressions and a marginal increase in the CTR. The close of day 3 left us doubting our strategy as a CTR of 0.39% was no where near our goal of 4%. Summary of Day 3: 6,010 impressions, 24 clicks, 0.39% CTR.

We had somehow overlooked a crucial setting. During the course of day 4, we noticed that our ads were being displayed on both the search and content networks. On average, 60% of the impressions we were getting were on the content network from which we had not obtained a single click. We promptly stopped our ads from showing up on the content network. The result of which was now obvious. Impressions dropped to 840 while we still obtained 18 clicks. Summary of Day 5: 840 impressions, 18 clicks, 2.14% CTR.

The following graph shows our CTR during the first 5 days of our active campaign.