Client Profile:

• Location: Munich & Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
• Founded in 2002
• 14 employees
• Event planning agency

Duration:

• From 12.04.2019 to 03.05.2019

Goals:

• Promoting ticket sales
• Acquiring new customers
• Maximize clicks

Campaigns:

• 4 campaigns with up to 2 Ad Groups were created based on the business objectives: Branding, Location, Concerts, Events Munich

Budget:

• For the entire duration €155 were available. This budget was divided based on importance of each campaign for the general objective. But the budgeting strategy for each ad group should be adjusted throughout the campaign.

Strategy:

• The first week should be used to improve all campaigns. In the second and third weeks further changes should be made, based on the results of the previous weeks.
• Evaluating the data to see if all campaigns and Ad Groups are effective → if not: improve keywords and ads or pause single Ad Groups

Post-Campaign Report

Target group:

• Age: mainly 30-59 years
• People from Munich and German tourists
• Culturally interested people

Executive Summary

Goals:

• Kulturgipfel is a company that promotes and organizes mainly classical concerts
• The challenge was to create a Google Ads account to help the company to acquire new and old customers

​

Campaign overview:

• Initially 4 campaigns with 2 Ad Groups each were created
• During the period the campaigns were running, all group members helped and coordinated to make changes on the various Ad Groups → regarding to keywords, ad extensions, ad wording
• The strategy was to monitor the campaigns on a daily basis and make changes as going along
• To create goals for this challenge the group used the keyword planner

​

Operational details:

• In the three weeks, our budget of €155 was divided
• In week one €70.48 were spent, in week two €43.63 were spent, and in week three €34.75

Data Studio Report

https://datastudio.google.com/open/1IMsH9ECzyBHexB_gPXVrBlk0Ky7UkEZm

Communication

• Legitimization with Google as an authorized seller of concert tickets was necessary → regulated market for ticket sales to prevent fraud
• Kulturgipfel has outsourced their IT-Services → technical changes to the website were not possible → no website optimization
• Limited access to Google Analytics, only quarterly report
• Conversion tracking was not possible → sales are conducted via the largest ticketing sales competitor Eventim
• No personal contact, due to distance between university and company
• Communication via phone and email worked well → no restrictions for the ad campaigns
• Company will receive access to the Google Ads account to continue advertising with Google

Overview and Development of all Campaigns

• Most clicks → “Location”
• Highest CTR → “Branding”
• Lowest costs

→ “Branding” with 9.9%

• Rest of the costs were almost equally distributed among the other campaigns
• “Concerts” & “Events Munich” achieved almost 400 clicks together

• Time span: 3 weeks
• During the first week overall impressions were quite high, but dropped during the second and third week
• Clicks started to rise at the beginning, declined at several points in time and increased in the end to its top scores
• CTR improved continuously over time mainly because of improved keywords and reduced impressions
• Average CPC fell throughout the time span
• The overall amount spent: €148.86

Overview and Development of all Campaigns

Most successful ads:

• The ad with the most impressions belongs to “Concerts”
• The ad with the best CTR (20.30%) throughout the three weeks belongs to “Location”

​

​

​

Best keywords:

• On the right are the keywords with the highest CTRs
• Top score with a CTR of 40% was reached by “München Open Air Sommer” and “Sommernacht der Filmmusik”
• “Veranstaltungen + Brunnenhof” reached a CTR of more than 25% and 44 clicks

Branding

Goal:

To improve the awareness of the brand Kulturgipfel

​

​

​

Week 1:

• Budget was set to €2/day
• The keywords were very specific but some were with low search quality
• Total of 227 impressions, 29 clicks → CTR 12.78%
• The “Contact us” ad was most successful (133 impressions 28 clicks)
• “Ticket” ads only got 1 click at 94 impressions
• Avg. CPC: €0.20, costs: €5.73

Week 2:

• “Ticket” campaign was not very attractive → paused on 23.04. due to ineffective keywords and low interest
• Budget was set to €2,5/day, CTR of 15%
• “Contact us” extended through phone number extension
• Avg. CPC was €0.20, costs: €3.84, Avg. CTR: 11.76%

Week 3:

• Best results due to pausing “tickets” → high CTR of 27.92%
• Easter Sunday highest CTR with 40.6%
• “Contact us” had a total of 43 clicks, 154 impressions and a budget of €0.90/day
• Avg. CPC of €0.12, costs: €5.19

Two Ad Groups:

• Contact information
• Awareness of ticket sales

Location

Goal:

Promoting the location Brunnenhof as special location in combination with classical concerts

​

​

​

Week 1:

• Good start right away
• Keywords were carefully chosen beforehand and it was also quite easy to imagine which queries people would make that could lead them to ads of this campaign
• “Brunnenhof” was in comparison to “leading to Brunnenhof” easier to handle regarding the keywords
• Texts of the ads written with an emotional tone worked well to catch people’s attention
• Start with a daily budget of €2.50
• Satisfying results: 1,120 impressions, 83 clicks, CTR of 7.44%, costs: €20.52

Week 2:

• Daily budget was lowered first to €2.30 and then to €2 to remain within the budget limit
• Some keywords were added to see whether they would work better, but with not much success
• Some keywords were improved by making them more specific
• Impressions became lower and CTR improved to 9.66%

Week 3:

• Full effect of improved keywords unfolded
• Impressions increased to 809 and clicks increased even more drastically to 105
• CTR of almost 13% was achieved

Two Ad Groups:

• “Brunnenhof”
• “leading to Brunnenhof”

Changes in keywords:

• Trying new keywords, thinking about other locations or things related to it to poach people
• Most effective keywords were the ones chosen at the beginning (e.g. “Nymphenburg”, “Schleißheim Konzerte”)

Challenge:

• Generating less impressions while maintaining klicks

Changes in keywords:

• Adding new keywords (e.g. “Veranstaltungen + Brunnenhof”)
• Trying to improve keywords by restricting them (e.g. “Residenz + München + Konzerte”)

Challenge:

• Generating more impressions and more klicks to reach more people that could be interested in listening to classical music at this exact location�

“Leading to Brunnenhof”

Brunnenhof

Concerts

Goal: �Promoting individual concerts of the summer open air to people searching for the artists or genre of the concert�Ad Groups:

• 7 potential concerts were selected to focus on (based on pre-sale numbers and competition on the topic)
• It was decided to only run 2 Ad Groups at a time and to swap out any Ad Group that would not be performing well

Week 1:

• Daily budget of €3 for 2 Ad Groups “Filmmusik” and “Carmina Burana”
• On first day a large coverage loss by “Filmmusik” with a CTR of only 0.48% because all keywords were unrestricted
• “Carmina Burana” had a CTR of 8% on that same day → large difference between the two Ad Groups continued because keywords of “Filmmusik” created many unwanted impressions
• Eventually the CTR could be raised by decreasing the amount of keywords for “Carmina Burana”, but the CTR of “Filmmusik” stayed under 1%,
• Avg. CPC: €0.31, costs: €17.79

Week 2:

• Daily budget was limited to €2.3
• Continuous work on keywords of “Filmmusik” could drastically decrease the impressions to 970 but also minimized clicks to 51
• Therefore it was decided to exchange it for a new Ad Group “Italo Pop”
• Avg. CPC: €0.34, costs: €15.14

​

​

Week 3:

• Impressions of “Italo Pop” stayed extremely low with a high of 4, and with only 1 click
• “Italo Pop” had the CTR of 8.33%
• Due to the limitation on the budget, the impressions on “Carmina Burana” also went down to about 50 per day
• Avg. CPC of €0.24, total costs of €10.41

“Carmina Burana”: The most clicked keywords were actually those with a direct connection to the art piece, such as “Carmina Burana”, “Carl Orff” or segments of the name “carmina”. Combinations generated few to no impressions or clicks.

“Filmmusik”: The popularity in musical scores made it difficult to limit the coverage loss on this Ad Group. All content of the concert is frequently searched for in contexts not related to concerts. Effective use of google ads was only possible for the keyword “Sommernacht der Filmmusik”, the exact title of the concert.

“Italo Pop”: Only the exact wording of “Italo Pop” generated any clicks or impressions. A possible explanation is that the music genre has only a small fan-base in Germany and this concert is rarely sold out.

Ad Groups keyword analysis:

Events Munich

Goal: �Promoting ticket sales, especially for the summer open air concerts

Two Ad Groups:

• “Open Airs” - promoting summer open air concerts
• “Sonstige Konzerte” - promoting other concerts of Kulturgipfel in Munich

Week 1:

• During week 1 the campaign had 6,600 impressions, but 92 clicks, that means a large coverage loss → keywords were improved and many negative keywords from search terms were added
• Total CTR for the first week was 1.39%
• As Google Ads recommended for each Ad Group at least 3 ads were added
• The daily budget reduced from €2.50 to €2.30
• Avg. CPC: €0.19, costs: €17.79

Week 2:

• To reduce the campaign costs the daily budget was lowered to €1.80
• The keyword list was continuously improved through modified, better, new or negative keywords
• Ads were better matched to keywords
• Through changes the CTR raised to 2.66% (54 clicks)
• Avg. CPC: €0.25, costs: €13.73

​

Week 3:

• All keywords were analyzed in terms of results in the past weeks → keywords were left that showed a CTR higher than 2.5%
• Only some ads appeared more often, independent of the content → not effective ads were paused and the “good” ones were improved to fit the active keywords. Ads of "Sonstige Konzerte" were also extended through 4 sitelinks

⇉ Ads effectiveness increased significantly

• Daily budget was reduced to €1.45
• Campaign achieved the best results: 101 clicks with a CTR of 5.75%
• CPC dropped to €0.12
• Costs: €11.67

Challenges and advantages by Ad Groups:

“Open Airs”:

• Only a few users searched exactly for open air or similar words, rather generally for concerts in Munich → therefore no clicks on some days
• Low competition for the keywords
• Detailed keywords like “Open Air+Müchen” etc. lead the target group of open airs directly to the ads

→ as a result the CTR was continuously high

“Sonstige Konzerte”:

• Intended for all other concerts

→ Keywords were also used by many other event planning agencies and ticket sellers

→ At the beginning difficult to find effective keywords

• Through many negative keywords and keywords optimisation the targeted CTR exceeded 5.55% in week 3
• Generated the most clicks for the campaign, 238 in total

Initial Goals and Outcomes

• Goals for impressions, clicks, avg. CPC and CTR were set after consulting Google Ads Keyword-Planner and based on available budget
• Set goals were mainly achieved
• Actual impressions exceeded the target values → large coverage loss in the first week
• All campaigns except “Branding” achieved more clicks than planned
• Overall avg. CPC outcomes were lower
• “Branding” had the highest CTR with 16.60%, followed by “Location” with a CTR of 9.74%
• “Concerts” & “Event Munich” CTRs for the entire duration were lower than planned, but target values could be achieved in week 3: “Concerts” CTR of 7.99%, “Events Munich” CTR of 5.75%

Learning Objectives

Team:

• To get an insight into how Google ads works
• To receive a relevant result for the company to help them evaluate whether Google Ads is a good marketing tool for them
• Learning about a new tool for marketing campaigns in one’s professional future �

Group Dynamics:

• Dividing the campaign between the four group members, rather than dividing the timeline
• Keeping an oversight over the complete budget was difficult without having any experience how google processes the given values → e.g. daily limit applies to the entire time the campaign runs
• Although campaigns were divided, budgeting had to be discussed by all group members and constant changes were to be made�

Acquiring new marketing skills that can be applied in real-life

Evaluation

It was the first time for everyone in the group creating Google Ads

• It took some time to learn all the features of creating a campaign
• This was probably the biggest challenge but also a fun and interesting learning experience

​

Facebook, Instagram or YouTube ads were not created because the given target group was mainly older generations

• Kulturgipfel has only few followers on their social media channels

​

It wasn’t clear that the daily budget was calculated as an average for the entire period, more money was spent than planned

• Therefore, in the last week the daily budget had to be set to an average of €1 for each campaign

​

Only focus on Google Ads

• No display ads were created throughout the campaign phase
• Due to uncertainty about all the functions of Google Ads

​

In the end

• All group members have learned a lot and gained valuable experience for the future

​

​

Recommendations

For the group:

• More time to conduct and prepare the campaigns
• To understand the patterns and functions of Google Ads better
• More data on target groups and search parameters of the website
• Access to Google Analytics would have been an advantage
• A more detailed introduction to the requirements of the challenge
• To understand the complex process of creating ads, planning a budget and trying various features
• Try-out period/mock campaign to get to know Google Ads
• A better communication within the group and dividing the tasks evenly from the beginning
• Would have made it easier to coordinate all campaigns and tasks around the Google Ads
• Longer duration of the campaign, to take advantage of the gained knowledge
• Larger and more flexible budget to make further experiences

​

For the company:

• It is recommended to also take a look at display ads, facebook ads and others
• Adapt the website to be able to track conversions
• It could help observing whether Google Ads generated more sales

Communication is important to make a successful campaign

Conclusion

All in all the set goals were achieved: all the campaigns except “Branding” exceeded the planned clicks and also when it comes to their CTRs, satisfying results were achieved with an average CTR of 3.34%

​

Learning effects throughout the campaigns were achieved. As a consequence, results improved over time what gave a sense of achievement and it was quite fun to observe the positive changes overtime

​

Conversions couldn’t be assessed which would have been a great measurement for Kulturgipfel to see how much return on investment could be produced and therefore to evaluate how sensible it is to have specific ads online

​

Learning how to use online advertising offers great opportunities to increase general attention for the product and to explore new ways of reaching people more efficiently

​

By using this tool, useful insights can be gained regarding competitors that are present online because the planning of Ad Groups and keywords requires an accurate analysis of their strategies online to be able to establish an effective Google Adwords campaign (e.g. through negative keywords)