eyeAds Team on Google Marketing Challenge

Finally we’ve got the results of the Google Marketing Challenge. We are semifinalist wich means we reach the TOP-50 of more than 2100 groups.

We want to thank to EyeOS and specially to Pau García-Milà their commitment in our campaign, and all the efforts they did for us.

The results can be checked here : (look for the campagin #9122982721).

When a user makes a search with Google and clicks to an Adwords advertising we consider him a potential target. When the potential target makes a click where we want him to, we consider it an accomplished objective and the page we’re making an on line advertising campaign will proceed to consider him a potential costumer.

But, what exactly is a landing page? Does it have anything yo do with airplanes and landings? In fact, it does, more than it looks like.

The landing page is the website where the Adwords advertising redirects the user. Its objective consists on calling the potential client’s attention and manipulate him so he does what we want him to (in marketing and advertisement terms, of course). Metaphorically speaking, it’s the page where “our future costumer has to land” and where we must be able to lead him to our product.

What’s the difference between a good landing page and a bad one? The answer Is simple: EFFECTIVENESS.

We need that behind our advertising there’s an effective landing page, a landing page that calls the user’s attention. Then so, we are going to give some advices for an effective landing page:

Advices fon an effective landing page:

1.A single picture speaks more than a thousand words: We agree that a minimum of written information is needed, bot not so much that it comes to the point of overflowing the user. If the user hasn’t related what we’re showing with what he’s looking for during the first five to seven second, then we’re losing a potential costumer. If we get a grip on him, he’ll be already interested in investing some of his time on the web page behind our landing page.

2.Click here: Buttons, we need buttons. Buttons taking an important part of the screen, if possible in a bright color (though one that doesn’t hurt the eye) and with a clearly guiding message.

3.Color does matter: We have to know how to play with colors. In my opinion, there are two well differentiated strategies we can follow

• The first and most commonly used strategy is to use similar colors in the landing page as in our business’ website, if not the same. That saves us from a lot of trouble thinking about every combination ans its meaning (almost for sure that’s what a graphic designer would have advised us to do during the page’s creation).
• A second possibility is to display colors freely, trying not to make combinations hurtful to the eyesight. For example, blue tonalities, from pastels to deep blue, they show seriousness. The green ones, tranquility. Red, aggressiveness and passion… (we can play with all this, though at a personal level it’s better to leave these subjects on professional hands).

Whatever we do, we have to avoid unattractive combinations:

Lime green + yellow letters = user clicks backwards as son as the landing page is downloaded.

You can check this effect by yourself. If you look right here and feel how you half-close your eyes in a grimmace of pain, then for sure something’s wrong.

4.Too many fonts are bad: this point comes from comments from Itsaso. They advised me not to use more than two different fonts on the same landing page (counting the ones logos and so on could contain).
It really looks like a silly detail, but it’s amazing how the eye dismisses anything unlikeable or unexpected.

An example: the eye is reading a text in a Times New Roman font. If you put a word in Lucinda Handwriting (which looks like school calligraphy) the eye will feel it strange so you’ll have to pay special attention to the word to get to understanding it. You won’t read it as easily as the rest.

5.Don’t use unnecessary punctuation signs: the abuse of exclamation or interrogational signs can make you look nervous, uneasy, even anxious in any text. It would create a sense of urgency/violence to the user and that, as a rule, is bad…

6.Try to make appear the keywords of your advertising in the landing page: Over anything, it will help you to get your advertising on Google. The Google spider loves that kind of things.

7.Don’t put text invisible to the human sight: that’s one of the things that displeases the Google spider; it could even make it unleash its fury against us.

If you follow these practical advises you can make a quality landing pages with a decent rating of conversion.

As we keep on advancing on our campaign we have become aware of the importance of the moment of the day or night when a user makes a click to our advertisings.

There are many factor that will determine the time lapse when our advertisings are going to be more effective, and the only way of improving is to know our costumers.

In our case, we’ve got two big and well differentiated campaigns, both exclusively focused on Spain:

-Office application campaign:

This campaign contains groups related to Word, contact manager (PIM), Excel and Power Point applications. Our objective is that the user registers so he can use the on line application.

On those groups we can observe quite similar behaviors:

• During Office hours they give us a high CTR (4%) though a low conversion ratio (18%).
• As much as it’s true that as the afternoon arrives our CTR gets worse, maybe because it’s the rush hour, our conversion ratio doubles (33%).

It’s been really hard to delimit a concrete timetable because the morning clickers have time to become conversions.

So in this case we’ve decided to show our advertisings during the whole day.

-Games campaign:

On this one we’ve got groups for Sonic, Prince of Persia, classic games and some old ones that no longer have a search warranty. We could say that the destination public to the advertisings already know what they want if they have arrived here.

It’s obvious that for playing one is supposed to be enjoying his free time, so it’s logical to think that the best hours will be from 14-15h. At the beginning we had no programmed groups so we could check out how until 15h that though they were printed they collected no clicks. Eventhough, we’ve accomplished some great results showing them on an accelerated way during a few hours at noon/tonight.

Link:  Desmarkt

Once our campaign has been launched it’s time for us to check if we’re accomplishing the objectives we created at the beginning. For this, it’s essential that we periodically watch the campaign and correct anything that could be not working.

Before anything else, we must have a strategy that shows us which direction we should follow, in our case we could resume it in one sentence:

To approach EyeOS to as many people as possible.

This sentence indicates us more that what it looks like at first sight, like, for example:

• Our objective is to maximize the clicks on our advertisements.
• The lower the CPC, the better.
• The advertisements must be imprinted only to potential clients (CTR around 5%).

This is a contest, so we must keep a good global statistics, which means we cannot allow an excessively low CTR.
With all these things already clear we can take our decisions, always in a coherent way and aligned with our campaign strategy.

Let’s see one of the problems that have been appearing and how we’ve fixed them:

1. Too many impressions (a poor CTR) on the EyeDoc group.

The problem:

This group contained the three most famous office applications: text processor, calculation sheet and presentations.
We found ourselves putting some keywords with a wide concordance that were producing 10000 daily impressions but very little clicks and, of course, even less conversions.

Not only we had together keywords for different applications, we also couldn’t guarantee that the advertisement shown was the correct one.

Solution:

We’ve split the group in three, one for each application. We have also amplified amplified our list of keywords for each group but only with keywords of concordance of sentence or exact. Naturally now we can know for sure that the advertisements are shown for the exact application.

These measures have allowed us to find out that the most interesting group is the one related with calculation sheet and that the text processor is the least lucrative.

And so, and following our strategy, we can double our strength in our more efficient groups.

Today’s advice: the key are the keywords, my friend

Following I give you a couple of points about how you can create a more efficient keyword list and what we should know:

1. Think about what terms does a client use to describe your products and services.
2. When you get a good keyword, you have to extend the list with variants of this keyword.
3. Adding ortographic errors, plurals and synonyms.
4. You must correct keywords too much generic or irrelevants.
5. Add descriptive terms and specifics about our product to obtain good results.
6. Use concordance options:

• When you put a phrase into [] the ad only appears when there is EXACT match with the search term.
• When you put a phrase into ” ” the ad appears when there is a phrase match with the search term.
• When you put a phrase without [] neither ” ” the ad appears when there is BROAD match with the search term.

We have to define our combat strategy and we can translate all to adwords terms and we will have a good draft version of our campaign. Therefore tomorrow we will meet with EyeOS to help us to answer the questions that it appear and give us their opinion and vision about the defined campaign.  Specifically, and thank you to the guide of our coordinator Antonio Cañabate, we must have the follow defined things:

• What kind of clients and segments are we trying to rich, achieve?
• Which are the aims that we want to achieve for each segment of market, if there are more of one “target”?
  
• Market investigation:

o Who is the competition and how they try to approach these clients and objectives?

o Who are these clients and how they are (location, what do they wish, which needs they have in relation with the services-objective,…)? and what do they want (how do they look for it, in which language, with which words)?

In this moment we are in a good position for translate this terms to adwords terms (objectives to achieve, initial keywords, …). The important thing is that after this analysis we can do a good market segmentation and extract the real objectives that we want achieve through our campaign. Begins the hard work!

We have chosen the company, we have met them and we’ve analyzed it. Now we have to get down to work and plan our strategy. Now is when we are really going to compete.

As a start we have made a previous report about eyeOS and our future strategy. In it the results of our investigation until now were to be reflected and analyzed in a brief though thorough way the following pints:

- Define the company. The typical “who we are”: our services, general objectives of the company, the mission, the vision, the values, the structure, the infrastructures…

- What is our market. In which field wee are working on and what market share do we present. For a better we can segment it according to the different products efficiency or services we offer and give according to who consumes them.

- Taret users. Who our clients or potential clients are; their profiles and motives for buying or acquiring the service.

- The competitors. Which other companies are their users? What profiles do they have?

- DAFO model. Weaknesses, threats, strengths and opportunities we face on the current market as well as against our competitors.

- Marketing and real communication strategies. What objectives has EyeOS and what actions are they currently taking to get them.

- Objectives of the strategy of the Adwords campaign. In what way our strategy adapts into the global EyeOS campaign. What specific goals do we want to accomplish with it? what part of our busines are we going to potenciate with this campaign?

- Choose the target users of our Adwords campaign. Why do we choose this users? What goals are we setting to use? What keywords are we going to use? what stand are we going to make?

- The institution of keywords and possible advertisements. Once decided the objectives and target users of our campaigns, we have to decide in which terms and with which keys word we are going to direct at them. Use creative texts that catch the users attention.

- Concludings. Lastly, we have to explain what made us take those decisions and what do we consider as a success. In other words: If, for instance, the goal to obtain is a company contract, we could consider a success that a company would fill in application form or that they would send us an e-mail through one of our advertisements from Google Adwords.

We have already begun the elaboration of our pre-report. We are in the middle of a brainstorm and making decisions, so in a few days we will be able to explain what objectives we want to accomplish with our campaign and what plan we’ve designed to get them. We’ll keep you informed.

Once the company was chosen it was the moment to meet with our client. We went to Cornella’s Citilab to meet Pau Garcia-Mila, the founder of EyeOS.

We had to explain to them what GOMCha was, what it consisted of, the deadlines.

As for them, que had to give us a preview of their company, and they had to explain to us what exactly EyeOS was.

Once the presentations were over, it was time to start working because we needed information to start shaping up our pre-report.

Pau told us that among their marketing activities they had conferences about Cloud Computing, free software, WebOS… around the world. Just the day before he had arrived from the Brazilian Campus Party.

Lastly, he outlined for us the kind of customers they had, just what our starting point on this GOMCha should be.

On this basis, we started our pre-report.