Spencer Hammitt

Google Advertisement Campaign: ERC

May 12th, 2016

Problem:

The Electronics Recycling Center at the University of San Diego would like to raise awareness in the San Diego County Region about their used electronic store. People are already aware of the fact that this is a place to throw out your old electronics; however, the ERC would like people to know that they are more than an e-waste dump, but they have quality functioning electronics for sale as well. The Digital Marketing classes from the previous semester were assigned to raise awareness about recycling electronics. They were more than successful in their consulting, and currently the ERC gets almost more E-Waste than they can handle. Our goal was to get more people in their store by the use of Google Advertising using the PPC (paid per click) method.  Previous efforts to gain sales in their store had been from strictly craigslist ads. We were looking for other outlets to be recognized on the internet while targeting the right consumers.

Outline of Our Ad Campaign-

Round 1, AD #1

Round 1, Ad #2

Round 1, Ad #3

Ad Round 1 Results:

Round 1 Process:

Our first round ads were designed to highlight the products available in the store by using the keywords we choose. We chose three different categories for our ads with the first one being more generic with a variety of product keywords and other key words related to the store. The 2nd ad was focused more on laptops, computers, monitors and cords. And the last ad was focused on home entertainment such as TV’s and speakers. We tried to match our keywords with the ad copy line. The only problem is we had way too many keywords that were all over the place. We should have focused on one or two main words while creating a bunch of different variety of phrases with those keywords.

A lot of our words had too much competition and struggled to be seen by consumer because it was beyond the first page of peoples search results.

Round 2 Ad:

Round 2 Ad Results:

 Process for Ad 2

From the first round of advertisements we recognized the keywords that did work and got rid of them, even if they had a lot of impressions, we were focused on clicks. From the first round advertisements we realized that the word “electronics” was extremely affective so we ran with that and put some variations with that key word. We had also noticed good results with keywords that had to do something with phone and we tried to get really specific with both of those categories.

Round 3 Ad

Round 3 Ad Results

Process for Round 3 Ads:

When revising round 2, it was obvious that our keywords used for phones didn’t work. Once again, there was very high competition for such words and also we didn’t find it appropriate because the ERC doesn’t have too many items related to phones. Our Golden word “electronics” shined once again in round 2. So for round 3, this word was going to be our main focus. In both the 2nd and 3rd round the word “electronics” was in our actual advertisement 3 times which helped boost our ad rank and lead to more clicks. We looked at what people were searching in previous round and we saw them searching Best Buy and Fry’s Electronics, so we decided to throw that in our list of keywords so consumers could see the ERC as an alternative to those stores.  Our most successful word ended up being “buy” in this round, and although it had a low quality score, it still had a decent CTR of 3.79%.

Conclusion:

Each Round our advertisements became more and more specific and focused on the fact that this was an electronic store, and focused less on the actual products in the store. Because the ERC is not an e-commerce site, it was appropriate to focus on the fact that it was a physical store. People searching for TV’s or lap tops could have been people searching to buy something online. Our Ad Copy line was called “abrasive to the ears” by one of our competing teams, but I also think that helped us gain more clicks because it was simple and informational. We didn’t want our ad to sound like a scam, which was difficult with a 35 character limit. We used short phrases instead of a smooth sentence to get the most information possible out there.

By becoming more narrow and focused on our golden words, we were able to improve our number of clicks every round. Along with clicks, our CTR improved as well as our average position. We were very pleased with our results and we believe our advertisement brought more customers in the store, leading to more sales.

*to see the full list of keyword results please visit