Figure 2 Donation Ad 1 Donation Ad 2

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1 Executive Summary Our goal for our Adwords campaign was to increase donations to Operation Help Now Inc. Operation Help Now Inc. is a non profit organization in Boston, Massachusetts that helps homeless children in developing nations, such as Haiti, India, and Sierra Leone. We did this by targeting specific keywords, through the use of three types of campaigns. These three types of ads were for direct link to our donations, indirect donation pages so people can learn more, and through directing people to our Facebook page. We wanted to target people in Boston who wanted to help nonprofits and make a difference. Each week of our campaign we increased our click-through-rate (CTR). The first week was our indirect donations campaign, which had a CTR of 0.74%. The second week was our direct donations campaign, which had a CTR of 1.09%, followed by our Facebook like ads, which had a CTR of 1.42%. Our second direct donations ad had the highest CTR, with a CTR of 1.71%. The keyword school had the highest number of clicks; a total of 54 clicks. Our ads were not successful as they could have been, but overall we improved the success of our ads. With a few changes in Adwords strategy and the overall marketing strategy, would help Operation Help Now Inc. increase awareness of the work they are doing and increase website traffic, which would in turn increase donations. The use of Google Analytics in conjunction with Google Adwords would be a helpful resource to see if traffic is increasing to the website and if people are actually making donations. We think that a focus on Operation Help Now s digital marketing strategy, they could increase awareness of their work in the Boston area and increase their donations. These donations can help them serve more children and continue the work that they do. Future Online Marketing Recommendations: We recommend that Operation Help Now INC. uses Adwords during their primary fundraising periods. This would help them get the most value out of their investment. They should also avoid highly competitive keywords and focus on the long tail keywords. They should try using words that worked well for us including, Haiti, school, and children. Operation Help Now Inc. also needs to be aware that many keywords are over $2.00 per click for successful placement. They need to observe how their ads are doing daily and remove poor performing keywords. We would also recommend improving their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy and increase their social media activity before implementing a paid Adwords campaign. Improving the website overall, especially landing pages would help both the user experience and Google search ranking. Also, we would recommend conducting a deeper competitor analysis, to find relevant and successful keywords that competitors are using.

2 Industry Component Our main goals during this campaign were to increase donations, increase website traffic and increase awareness of Operation Help Now Inc. We wanted to create two types of campaigns: a donation (indirect and direct) and a Facebook campaign. For the direct and indirect donations campaigns we wanted to get searchers to learn more about Operation Help Now and in turn donate. For the Facebook campaign, we wanted people to like the Facebook page so they could continue learning about the organization and then down the line people could donate. Our CPC goal at the beginning of the campaign was $1.59 for our Facebook campaigns and $0.51 for the donations campaigns. We split up our three weeks by running one campaign each week. For each campaign, we ran two ad groups. More information on our campaigns can be found in Figure 1. We monitored our keywords performance daily and deleted some as necessary. Each week, we paused our previous campaigns and enabled the new one. Lastly, on some keywords, we increased our maximum bid if it was not too much money. Figure 1 Campaign Direct Donations Indirect Donations Facebook Dates April April 24 - May 2 May 2-9 Ad Group Donation Ad 1 Donation Ad 2 Youtube Video OHN Website Facebook Like 1 Facebook Like 2 Successful Keywords School Help Children Money School, Money Haiti, Children, India Haiti School Budget $10/day $12/day $7.53/day Total Cost $57.71 $ $71.72 Figure 2 Donation Ad 1 Donation Ad 2

3 Figure 3 YouTube Video OHN Website Figure 4 Facebook Like 1 Facebook Like 2 Due to issues with the ECTR of our original keyword lists and for the sake of simplification, we had to restructure all of our campaigns and their ad groups. In the pre-campaign report, we initially strategized two campaigns titled Donations and Facebook, with two ad groups each. The Donations campaign included Direct Donations and Indirect Donations ad groups, each with two ads. The Facebook campaign included Like Our Page and Follow to Support ad groups, each with two ads. For our final campaign strategy, we turned the Direct Donations and Indirect Donations ad groups into overarching campaigns. They included Donation Ad 1 and Donation Ad 2 and Youtube video and OHN Website ad groups, respectively. New keywords were added to the original lists, including several broad match keywords including Haiti, school, money, school supplies, children, and India. Originally, we planned to run two campaigns simultaneously with the strategy of increasing the daily budget week over week, allocating the majority of the budget in the last week. In our realized plan, we ran each campaign separately for one week at a time. Although each of our campaigns had different purposes, we had several overlapping keywords and we did not want our ads to compete with each other. Similarly to our original plan, the majority of our budget was allocated towards driving donations (whether directly or indirectly) and the lesser amount was allocated towards driving Facebook likes and engagement.

4 The restructuring enabled a less convoluted strategy implementation and yielded greater impressions than what our previous strategy would have allowed for. Adding the broad match keywords in particular strengthened our performance, which can be assumed by the keywords performance in both search popularity and clicks received from their search. Each week, we increased our click-through-rate (CTR) for each campaign that we did. During our first week, we received a CTR of 0.74% during our indirect donations campaign. Then during our second week we increased our CTR to 1.09% for our direct donations campaign. Then the third week we increased our CTR to 1.42% for the Facebook campaign. We increased our CTR each week by finding keywords that received clicks and using them. Our best ad was the Facebook Ad 2; it had a CTR of 1.71%, with the least amount of money spent. Our indirect donations to OHN s website did the worst with a CTR of 0.48%. Our indirect donations to a YouTube video received the most clicks with 48 clicks that week. During the course of the three weeks, the most effective keywords were school and Haiti. The other keywords that received clicks were children, money, India, scholarship and help children. School had the most clicks, with a total of 54. The keyword, children, had the highest number of impressions with a total of 5,666. Although Help children only received 3 clicks, the CTR was the highest with 2.68%. We were ineffective in our phrase match keywords such as help children in need and relief organizations. Key Metrics for Operation Help Now Inc. Ads Clicks Impressions CTR Average CPC Direct Donations - Donation Ad 1 Direct Donations - Donation Ad 2 Facebook - Facebook Like 1 Facebook - Facebook Like 2 Indirect Donations - OHN Website 24 2, % $ % $ , % $ , % $ , % $1.71

5 Indirect Donations - YouTube video 46 3, % $1.25 Total , % $1.62 Although we faced many obstacles throughout our campaign, we achieved an excellent performance and adapted our campaigns to be successful. Overall, broad match keywords were more successful than phrase match keywords. We did not end up using exact match keywords as we had planned since these keywords did not increase clicks. We received many impressions on our ads since we had many keywords listed in each ad group. In total, we received 154 clicks with an average CPC of $1.62. This is a huge success for Operation Help Now, Inc. but there is still room for future improvements. Future Recommendations In the future, we recommend that the Operation Help Now organization use AdWords during their primary fundraising periods. This will not only help them budget their money more easily, but also help them garner more donations for specific events. To obtain the most value out of their AdWords investment, Operation Help Now should be cautious of highly competitive keywords. If they focus on long tail keywords, which aid in pinpointing the correct consumers, they will be more successful with the goals that they want to achieve. We also recommend that the client continues to focus on some of the successful keywords that we mentioned in the chart above including Haiti and children. Including some of these words in their long string keywords will also aid in getting in searches with higher volumes. They will need a budget that allows them to allocate enough money to gain a spot on the first page in their keyword selections. Through our campaign we discovered that some of these keywords required $2 or higher bids for successful placement. We advise that Operation Help Now be aware of this and monitor the AdWord campaign success daily to get the most for their money. If keywords are performing poorly, then they should be removed immediately from their campaigns. Operation Help Now could stay with a similar budget to the one we used for these campaigns to achieve similar rates of success. The AdWords return on investment for the overall campaign for Operation Help Now cannot be calculated properly since the team did not have access to Google Analytics or any other analytical tools for the website, Facebook, or YouTube account of the organization. However, we believe the clicks we received through our Facebook ads brought micro conversions through a like on Operation Help Now s page. In the time of our campaign, OHN gained 7 likes on Facebook. Although we cannot directly contribute our campaign to these likes, it is an option for the source of the likes. If OHN is hoping to replicate similar AdWord results, we

6 recommend that they dedicate an hour to making ideal ads for each campaign and then devote at least four hours a week to monitoring and editing the AdWords campaigns. We also think it would be beneficial for them to spend time looking at the analytics of the website and their donations to look for any direct increase in traffic due to their campaigns. Monitoring these will help them determine their return on investment. GOMC Learning Objectives Learning Component Discuss online marketing and media planning. Collaborate effectively in a professional group setting. Explain the following concepts: clickthrough rate (CTR), landing page experience, campaign optimization, and return on investment (ROI). Discuss the benefits of targeting advertising to a select audience. Illustrate how technical and cultural factors affect the success of an online advertising campaign Retrieved from Web. May Our team expected to learn beyond the foundations of PPC advertising and understand how to optimize strategy in order to engage and convert specific targets. We also hoped to receive a better understanding of the effort required to run a successful campaign on Adwords. Regardless of our campaign outcome, we felt we obtained a greater understanding of the work and research required to run a successful and cohesive search engine network campaign. In regards to GOMC s learning objectives, we now feel we have a more indepth understanding of the online marketing landscape; we are able to collaborate effectively and efficiently to complete a professional project; we are able to fully articulate clickthrough rate, landing page experience, campaign optimization and ROI and explain their significance; explain the benefits of specific targeting and; communicate how external factors affect the results of a campaign. The key learning outcome of this challenge will be keyword and campaign optimization. Finding and utilizing appropriate keywords was our biggest challenge to overcome and overcoming that challenge taught us a great deal on how to perform that task. We initially expected the process of creating effective ads and finding appropriate keywords for our ad groups to be a much quicker than it actually was. Research took several hours and creating engaging ads accommodating to the character restrictions was more difficult than our initial perception.

7 Group Dynamics We had trouble finding relevant keywords with high ECTRs, which is one of the main reasons we began our campaign late. We overcame this challenge through hours of keyword research and assistance from our Search Engine Marketing and Analytics professor. Our group had a great dynamic, with no issues in terms of reliability or compatibility. We worked well together and communicated regularly to resolve issues and check the status of each other's assigned tasks. Client Dynamics The client, Ibrahim Khonteh, co-founder of Operation Help Now, was not communicative and did not help formulate strategy for the pre-campaign or for the implemented campaign. There was sparse communication throughout the weeks of running the campaigns, however, it mainly consisted of our group updating Ibrahim on our efforts. We were expecting better communication and greater interest in the project from the co-founder. Operation Help Now had poor online infrastructure to begin with, which made it very difficult to run a successful campaign. The website was not search engine or user friendly and did not facilitate the donation process. The Network for Good donation page had little content to indicate what the cause was about and probably left most users unwilling to donate. Also, OHN s Facebook is irregularly updated and has been inactive most of the year, so we saw few Facebook conversions (although there was a net increase in Facebook likes since the start of our campaign). Future Recommendations If feasible, we would work on improving the usability and content of our client s website and increase their online presence. We would utilize holistic SEO strategy (optimize content, keywords, meta descriptions, title tags, linking, etc ) and increase social media activity before implementing a paid Adwords campaign. We would then conduct a deeper competitive analysis to identify relevant and successful keywords of competing organizations. Overall, we would put a greater emphasis on improving our efforts in the activities prior to running a successful campaign, rather than improving our efforts in running the actual campaign. We feel that greater results would have been achieved if our landing pages were optimized prior to beginning the campaign. Group dynamics were excellent. The client dynamic could have potentially improved if we made greater attempts to receive the co-founder s input, rather than providing updates. However, we always made ourselves open for discussion and change.