Ad Campaign Completed

The ad campaign I created was completed this week!  I was very skeptical after the first couple days but I think overall, the campaign was quite successful.  I was pleasantly surprised by the final results of the analytics that Google Ads provides and feel that the campaign far exceeded my expectations.  Here is what my ad looked like, in live action on the web! 

 

At first, my campaign was off to a bad start.  But one thing I've learned from this class, marketing takes time and you must be patient and committed; resisting the urge to pull the plug too soon on advertisement campaigns.  Below you will see a picture of the campaign's success after two days of running online. 

 

 

$0 spent, 6 impressions, 0 clicks, and 0 conversions...   Not exactly encouraging data.  I quickly started to reflect on why this was happening.  Did I completely botch the concept?  Did I use the right phrases, keywords, and descriptions?  Do my ads scream 'clickbait' to anyone who sees them?  Is this a reflection of where the ad points; my website of a theoretical company that isn't real?  Should I scrap the whole thing and start this over from scratch?  The initial feelings/impressions that I had were quite negative.  After all, I have never done this before.  My website was created a few weeks ago; also something I've never done before.  The website is for a company and services that are made up, and even though this felt like something I could potentially explore in the future, I don't actually offer expert healthcare consulting services to clients.  I reviewed the analytics and my ad.  Google gave a couple key suggestions for improving the ad's success, which I did.  I even tried to see if I could make major adjustments to what I originally created.  But then I remembered the stories from Guerrilla Marketing about how companies had slow progress for ads, pulled the plug early, and missed out on a potentially successful campaign.  I decided to push through, trust the sophistication of Google's process and keep an eye on the progress so that I could learn from this ad, to be able to make more effective ads in the future.  So how did that turn out?  Let's take a look! 

 

 

Much better, right?  Nearly 8k impressions and 88 clicks!  Quite the turnaround for only a few more days of running the ads!  Now, having 0 conversions might catch your eye as a red flag, but I was accepting of that statistic.  When I created my ad, I had Google focus on generating leads and chose the benchmark for a conversion to be defined as collecting customer information through a form on my website, requesting additional information on my consulting services.  So it seemed very reasonable that people wouldn't fill out the form requesting more information from a company that doesn't truly exist or offer services for healthcare consulting. 

 

Given the billions of people online, 8k impressions and 88 clicks might not seem like a lot but my ad was also only presented to users within a 25 mile radius of Glen Ellyn, IL.  So actually 8k impressions is pretty good in my book!  Above is a screenshot of location analytics which showed where my clicks were coming from.  This gives a great information that indicates where ads were successful and where they weren't.  This would be instrumental data for refining the ad and targeting the locations that seem to generate more interest in the service.  Also worth mentioning, I was only paying a max of $4/day which Google projected would lead to 20-50 clicks per month.  88 in ten days is quite a bit more than that and in a shorter time!  Sounds like a small success to me.

More to come on the final product and lessons learned from this experience.  I look forward to sharing the full details of the campaign, lessons learned, and how I plan to use the knowledge I obtained through this project for future use.

Until next time,