Executive Summary Avenue is a sneaker store located in Antwerp, Belgium that mostly offers exclusive models of sneaker brands like adidas, Nike,

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1 Executive Summary Avenue is a sneaker store located in Antwerp, Belgium that mostly offers exclusive models of sneaker brands like adidas, Nike, Reebok, Asics, etc. Since December 2016 the store has a renewed web shop. Demographic data through Google Analytics showed us that the gap between male and female visitors was quite big. Only one third of the total number of visitors was female. Our team ran eight campaigns in total (6 Search Network Only and 2 Display Only). These campaigns consisted out of 27 Ad Groups, 55 Ads, 187 keywords and ran from April 4 till April 25, 2017 with a budget of $250. Initially we decided to only run four campaigns, but we thought it would be interesting to also test different types of campaigns and approaches. Our targeted achievements were 625 clicks and impressions at an average CPC of $0.40. Key results: The campaigns have far exceeded our established goals. The six campaigns on the Only Search Network had 873 clicks with 13,875 impressions leading to a click-through (CTR) rate of 6.29% and an average cost-per-click (CPC) of $0.25 with a total cost of $ Best running campaign; BA Women Flanders had 474 clicks with 4,106 impressions, resulting in a CTR of 11.54% and an average CPC of $0.16 with a total cost of $ To make sure the entire budget of $250 would be spent by the end of our three week during campaign, we adjusted our strategy and ran two additional Display Only campaigns for the last three days. These had 164 clicks with 32,791 impressions, resulting to a low CTR of 0.50% and an average CPC of $0.22 costing the remaining $35.99 of the total budget. The total cost of the eight campaigns together was $ over a period of three full weeks. Conclusion: Our main goals were to create more Brand awareness and more Female customers. Besides that, we wanted to create more traffic on the website. Our last goal was to promote a specific type of shoe that is not that well known in Flanders, Belgium. The results show us that we could deliver the objectives set for the client, even though we had a limited period and money available. Both Search and Display turned out to be very profitable channels. This experience taught us that success in AdWords is determined by day-to-day control and optimization. Future Online Recommendations: Avenue s website is well designed and lets you navigate easily through the different pages. The only thing that is missing is a clear subdivision between women s sneakers and men s sneakers. This way gender-based ads would be more effective. 1

2 Industry Component Campaign Overview: Since Avenue s webstore was already performing very well, our team decided to setup some goals to study how the website could benefit even more by using AdWords (Table 1). Based on the Google Analytics research our goals were 1) to increase brand awareness of the webstore directed to female visitors in the Netherlands and the region Flanders in Belgium, 2) to increase brand awareness of a specific brand in this case Asics, and 3) try-out different methods of campaigns that can have success around this specific segment. In order to achieve our specific goals, presented in Table 1, we initially started with four campaigns. However, this developed into a total of eight campaigns, six on the Google Search Network and two on the Display Network. These campaigns consisted out of 27 AdGroups, 187 keywords, 55 Ads with Ad Extensions like Sitelinks, Callouts, Location and Call Extensions and ran from April 4 till April 25, Table 2 consists an overview of the different campaigns. Table 2 Campaign Overview Table 1 Proposed success metrics GSN Clicks 625 Impressions CTR 1% Avg. CPC $0.40 Budget $250 Google Search Network Display Network Campaign BA BA Remarketing: Avenue Blue Puma Women Women Asics In Cart/ Nt Asics Sneakers Sneakers Fenty Flanders Netherlands Bought Ad Group Ads Keywords / Ad Extensions Bid Strategy CPC CPA CPC All campaigns were location targeted in Flanders, The Netherlands or a combination of both in order to reach for an international audience without having the difficulty of integrating multiple languages. Our main focus during the entire campaign was on the BA - Women campaigns in Flanders and the Netherlands as well as the Asics campaign, because these were the most important for reaching our goals. We also ran smaller campaigns for just a couple of days to experiment with AdWords and analyze what the most effective strategies are for Avenue. The Blue Sneakers campaign was setup to observe how many people would 2

3 search for blue sneakers on Google and eventually click on our ad. The Puma Fenty campaign only lasted one day, this was the day the sneakers got released on Avenue s website. The Asics and Avenue Sneakers Display campaigns ran for only two days and were targeted to in-market audience that were interested in Athletic shoes or sneakers and the other group was targeted to visitors that had already visited the Asics page on Avenue s website. The 21 days of the campaign were divided by the four team members who took turns to check the day by day status of the running campaigns and make the required adjustments at the end of each day. The daily status and adjustments were written down in a log so the team and Avenue were up to date and transparent in their communication. These tasks included retrieving useful data not only from Google AdWords itself, but also from Google Analytics. Negative keyword addition was handled by adding keywords with the highest Bounce rate from the Search Queries. While keyword addition was based on Search Term Report, the manual Bid Adjustment was based on the success of the keyword and Budget Adjustment on the success of campaigns. Furthermore, the usage of Opportunities and Tools helped us to adjust the campaigns to be as effective as possible. Campaign evolution: Week 1: (4-11th of April 2017) On April 4 th, the campaigns for Brand awareness in the Netherlands and Belgium, and the campaign Asics Flanders had begun. Besides these three campaigns we had also created a preliminary campaign for all blue sneakers. We set manual bid adjustment, in this way we were able to adjust the bids according to the first page estimate bid. After using Manual CPC adjustment, we changed it to Enhanced CPC to see which type of bidding was more effective for our daily budget. After only two days we added two new ad groups to test exclusive online releases: adidas NMD R2 Table 3 Impact per week Impact Week 1: 4/04 11/04 Impressions: Clicks: 217 CTR: 4,86% Cost: $78.86 Week 2: 12/04-18/04 Impressions: Clicks: 304 CTR: 7,44% Cost: $65,66 Week 3: 19/04-25/04 Impressions: Clicks: 351 CTR: 1,35% Cost: $105,45 and Rihanna Puma Fenty Creeper. Furthermore, we created a planning for our campaigns; ads will run from 8am until 1am. After a few days, we paused our blue sneaker campaign to obtain more budget for a new ad group. By the end of this week we created our remarketing campaign. The first week we were very cautious with our given budget and did not want to overspend. 3

4 Week 2: (12-18th April 2017): In the second week we mainly focused on the keywords; we kept adjusting them according to quality scores and first page estimate bid. We changed the goal for the Asics campaign to CPA, so the goal became $3,00. We achieved more than 363 sessions, which meant that more visitors found the website thanks to our Google AdWords campaign. Week 3 (19-25th April 2017): In the last week, we decided to create a Display ad for Asics in order to spend our entire budget. Furthermore, we continued to adjust bid strategies and keywords. To make sure the entire budget of 250 would be spend, we decided to run two additional Display only campaigns for the last three days. These Display only campaigns resulted in 164 clicks, impressions, CTR of 0.50% and an average CPC of $0.22, spending the remaining $35.99 of the total budget. We initially started with four campaigns but by the end of the third week we had developed eight campaigns. Table 3 mentions the impact per week. Key Results: If we look at the overall evolution of our campaign, we notice that our results Table 4: Total overview KPI s Goals Results Clicks 625 1,037 Impressions ,666 CTR 1% 2.22% Avg. CPC $0.40 $0.24 Total Cost $250 $ are stable and slightly positive. We obtained three conversions with a revenue of $460 and a profit of $230, which is more than we expected at the beginning of our campaign. In the first week, we achieved two conversions, which resulted in a revenue of $300. This number is based on the average profit per sale. These conversions were a positive sign and naturally we wanted to continue this for the rest of our campaign. In the second week, we accomplished one conversion, which resulted in a revenue of $160. However, we had expected at the end of the second week to have spent more of our budget. Our low budget spending is a result of our automatic CPC strategy. Therefore, we adjusted our strategy for the last week of the campaign in order to spend the surplus of the first two weeks and the rest of our remaining budget. Thanks to the knowledge of our colleges and internal communication, we improved our campaign strategy and create two Display only campaigns. We raised our daily budget so we had less boundaries and could spend more money the last few days. The results showed that this helped to push our campaign towards the end of our remaining budget. The total cost in the last week was $ of which $35.99 was used for the Display only campaign. If we look at the details of the Display only campaign, we see that this action resulted in 164 clicks, with 4

5 impressions. Here, the CTR was 0.50% with an average CPC $0.22 (Table 3). To evaluate the ROI we calculated it according to the total budget spent ($ for the campaign cost and an additional $230 for the margin of the sold sneakers) and the profit we made of the three conversions ($460). This gives us a ROI of -4.0%. Unfortunately, our ROI has a negative percentage, which means it has cost Avenue money to generate the conversions. However, the goal of this campaign was not to achieve a lot of conversions, but to create visibility and awareness. We have achieved our set goals and therefore the ROI has less importance for this campaign. Nevertheless, for Avenue s future AdWords strategy we recommend more targeted campaigns and should for example focus on selling the special editions of specific sneakers. 11 of the total 27 ad groups had a CTR between 4% and 24%. Two ad groups from the BAwomen Flanders campaign had the highest CTR of all while running for three whole weeks. This high CTR was obtained by CPC bid adjustment, keyword adding, negative keyword adding, ad modification, et cetera (Table 5). Other ad groups were split up or added to the other campaigns during the campaign period. Table 5 Best performing Ad groups. Based on the running period, a high level of Clicks and Impressions Ad Groups Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Cost Women Flanders Antwerp Women Flanders 0% Chart 1: BA - Women Flanders CTR April 4 - April 25 a CTR of to 18.57% this campaign 258 1, % $0.10 $ $16.89% $0.12 $13.72 As you can see on chart 1, the BA- women Flanders campaign had a CTR of 10.43% on the first day. The CTR dropped below 5% in the first two days before making an increase while decrease moments were not under the 10% for the rest of the campaign. Starting from had the best CTR with an average of 12%. Affective keywords for our campaign have been Avenue with a CTR of 23.48% or Avenue store with a CTR of 40.45%. However, these keywords were quite general Chart 2: Avg. CPC vs. Clicks All campaigns. April 4 - April 25 Clicks Avg, CPC $0,60 $0,40 $0,20 $- 5

6 and not focusing to target more women. Some keywords such as, dsquared, west, 5th avenue that had a bounce percentage of 100% were turned into negative keywords. By pausing, adding or adjusting the CPC of several keywords with a high quality score and by adding the negative keywords we managed to lower the average CPC and increase the amount of Clicks (chart 2). Conclusion: The AdWords Campaign was successful given the short period of time and the limited budget. Thanks to the BA- Women Flanders and BA- Women Netherlands campaigns the number of female visitors was 4.26% higher, compared to the weeks before. This 4.26% is based on Google/CPC derived from Google Analytics. The BA Women campaign and the Asics campaign ultimately led to three conversions. Furthermore we exceeded the forecast of CTR with 222% and managed to lower the average CPC with 60% in over three weeks. By using Google Analytics, Scheduled Reports, Opportunities, Tools and the Search Terms Report from Google AdWords, we were able to set up and modify the different campaigns the best way possible to achieve our goals. Table 6 Best performing campaigns Campaigns Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Avg. Pos. Cost BA- Women Flanders 474 4, % $ $75.15 BA- Women Netherlands 250 6, % $ $66.81 Asics 137 3, % $ $68.38 Future Online Recommendations: Integrating Google AdWords into the marketing strategy of Avenue is a smart move. This project proved that in a short period of time and with a limited budget, Avenue can accomplish a better online presence. Especially, the Display only campaign booked great results within only three days. Given these results we are able to give some future recommendations: AdWords Search and Display: In the future, we recommend Avenue to do more online and offline campaigns to attract more female customers. For example, they can organize a Lady s Night in the physical store and give the women a coupon for their next online purchase. In this way, Avenue directs more traffic towards the webstore and can use a Display campaign to complement the experience and create more visibility and awareness among women. Google Shopping is also something that Avenue can benefit from since the website has a strong and well-designed operating system. Online Marketing: Avenue engages its audience through social media. In the future Avenue should keep up this strategy and stay active on its social media platforms to generate more online traffic and sales. The interests of the website visitors are mainly shopping, fashion, apparel, accessories, shoes and athletic shoes. It could be interesting to use these terms in hashtags to generate more followers. 6

7 Keep website up to date: It is important that Avenue keeps the website up to date according to the visitors preferences and develop an online atmosphere where making purchases is encouraged. Adding a filter where female visitors can select to only view women s sneakers. This way an ad targeted to women can have a lower bounce rate. Retargeting: It is useful for Avenue to create a retargeting campaign, because it will actively target customers that are already interested in the products and are willing to make a purchase. For example, Avenue can help these customers with an extra 10% discount to give them that extra little push for them to make the purchase. Learning Component Learning objectives & outcomes: Our team saw the GOMC as an opportunity to gain knowledge about Google AdWords and Google Analytics. Some of us had previous experience with AdWords and Analytics, while others had trouble to understand AdWords and Analytics. Before and during the campaign we developed more skills by watching online tutorials about Google AdWords and Analytics and acquire different Google certificates. Our personal aim was to learn as much as possible about online marketing. During the three campaign weeks, we used Google Analytics to evaluate the data of the campaign. Every day we wrote down the day-to-day results in our logbook. Our first aim for Avenue was to create more brand awareness for women sneakers in Flanders and the Netherlands. Yet given the limited amount of time creating full brand awareness among these target groups was a bit too ambitious. In the beginning of the campaign we were very cautious about our spending. This resulted in a surplus for the last week. Therefore, we decided to create two Displays. We mainly focused on keywords, CTR, CPC. We used Google Analytics to analyze keywords with high bounce rates and keywords with high search volume. If keywords had a high bounce rate or did not generate any traffic we deleted them or add them to negative keywords. Keywords with a high search volume were given more CPC or another manual adjustment to boost CTR. In the early stages conversions were measured through Google Analytics, where goals for the different campaigns were set up. To see weather this goal was reached from one of our campaigns, we had to check the source/medium of these particular goals. Group dynamics: Our GOMC team consists of four members. Everybody has busy schedules consequently it was not always easy to coordinate meetings and work together. First, we made a role division and chose a team captain. Someone who knew his way in the web and the sneaker world was an obvious choice. During the preparation for the pre-campaign report a team member left our group. For the remaining members, it was 7

8 quite difficult to reorganize the tasks. Fortunately, one week later our team was reinforced with a new team member. At the beginning of the campaign everyone got assigned particular days per week to keep track of the campaign s development and make the necessary changes. The first two weeks of our campaign were during the Easter holidays so it was not possible to meet up every day to talk about the changes that were made. To overcome this, we used tools as Google Docs and Facebook to maximize our organization and communication. Client Dynamics: Our client Avenue Store was excited to be working with us in order to promote their online business through Google AdWords. Avenue has a small but steady team that is devoted to selling their products to a most diverse public. However, the physical store takes up the most part of their time causing their online marketing to be on a low level. The Avenue team was eager to expand their online presence, but in a targeted manner that results in more sales and a better divide between male and female. Our team captain maintained the regular contact with Avenue s e-commerce managers. Next to that we organized face-to-face meetings to achieve transparent communication. Fortunately, Avenue was open to all our suggestions and gave us carte blanche in terms of content changes and experimenting with different kind of campaigns. The open communication and the possibility to make quick changes enabled us to reach all our goals. Avenue s team has been very enthusiastic about the project s outcome and willing to continue the Google AdWords strategy to maintain a consistent online presence. Future Recommendations: Avenue was already using Google Analytics when we integrated Google AdWords to their marketing plan. This helped us to analyze the traffic to the site. However, we recommend expanding the use of Analytics even more by introducing the Search Console Tool. This helps to not only optimize Avenue s SEO, but also analyses the way people search, which in turn can upgrade the keywords for AdWords. If we had the opportunity to participate in the Challenge again, we would divide the budget more efficiently. We were worried that we would ve run out of money before the end of the campaign, which led to a surplus in the third week. To resolve this issue, we created two Display Only campaigns. These campaigns proved to be efficient and we would recommend Avenue to continue a Display Only campaign. To conclude, Avenue can improve the website by making a clear subdivision between women s sneakers and men s sneakers. Although Avenue thrives for selling unisex products in order to attract more females to the website, clear statements are necessary. 8