I decided to have my campaign focus on University of Northern Iowa Athletics and see if Adwords would be a good source to advertise to Panther Fans and the rest of America. My goal starting out was to increase the traffic flow to UNI’s athletic website. I also had a couple side goal of trying to increase sales of Volleyball and Football Tickets/increasing their attendance. Also had a goal of increasing awareness for UNI Track & Field, but not the best time of year for that.
Since my campaign only lasted for a total of 4 days and spent all 15+ dollars in those 4 days I really wasn’t able to see if I could accomplish all my goals. I would say that I did accomplish my first goal of increasing the flow of traffic to UNI’s athletic website.
Myself as the exec of this ad campaign, I would say that it was a very successful one in its self. A few good things to point out from what I can see from the reports are: the excellent Click Through Rate (CTR) of 13.85% overall, which comes form 165 Clicks out of a total of 1191 Impressions. Also my Average Cost Per Click (CPC) was $0.12 which is VERY good! My Average Ad Position was 1.6, which means my ad was always either number 1 or 2 usually.
I believe that having a high CTR and low CPC are cornerstones for a great ad campaign using Google Adwords. I think it might be beneficial for UNI Athletics to use Adwords. Not all the time, but in specific times, such as before home athletic events to increase ticket sales, and attendance or when something really big happens for a team or an individual athlete. The CPC isn’t high, but I do know that the budgets are tight. The thing they have to remember you are still getting lots of impressions, but only have to pay for the clicks. You do have to worry about your own employees clicking on your ads though and costing you money too.
Some other Highlights from my campaign are some high CTR’s of my keywords.
“Northern Iowa Basketball” = 15.38%
“Northern Iowa Football” = 15.07%
“UNI Basketball” = 12.50%
“Northern Iowa Athletics” = 30%
“UNI football tickets” = 42.11%
“UNI football schedule” = 22.31%
“UNI Volleyball” = 24.66%
“UNI football” = 19.55%
“UNI athletics” = 24.64%
“UNI Volleyball Schedule” = 57.14%
These are very successful key words and all with a quality score of 7+ all the way up to 10, which is the highest. I believe the reason that the Volleyball related Keywords had such a high CTR is due to the fact that they had 2 home Volleyball games going on during my ad campaign.
My recommendations are, if UNI would use ads for athletics in this way I would defiantly control when and where they would be shown so you don’t spend a ton, but do believe that it is a very effective way to advertise for athletics at a University. I believe that most of my keywords were relevant and useful, but there were a couple words that I could delete that didn’t get a high CTR or any clicks at all. I would also make a couple different Campaigns if I was to do this for an athletics department so I could use keywords specific to that ad rather then you being able to Google UNI football and a UNI track & field ad comes up. I would like to see the results of an ad that is up a couple days before a home football or men’s basketball game to see if it does help increase attendance or ticket sales. It would be nice to be able to see what the people actually did on the website once they clicked through the ad, or how long they stayed on the website as well. Overall I believe my campaign went extremely well.
Links Below are great for beginners to learn more about Google Adwords:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=21899&from=21899&rd=1
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=1316546&rd=2
No comments:
Post a Comment