The Last Post

For all loyal viewers thank you for staying tuned and following the progress of our campaign. Our Adwords campaing finished with about 500 clicks and over 4 million impressions. This is my last Post! Farwell

Final Week of Adwords Campaign

This is the final week of our Adwords campaign. After adjusting our budget from the previous week, today we will see how well we did in our campaign. This was a great project to do and be a part of this semester. For future uses, I would use the Google Adwords to promote any business I am a associated with.

Winding down....

With only 2 days left in the competition, I am frantically trying to spend the remaining 60 dollars left in our budget. I decided to raise the maximum bids and daily budget for each category drastically, because it is better to run out of money before the deadline as opposed to having some leftover. So far we have had 440 people click through to our site at an average CPC of $0.33, which we consider to be rather successful. Before the campaign began, the website had only received about 1,500 clicks in the past year, so adding 30% to that in only 4% of the time is a good accomplishment.

-Jeff

2nd Week Running Adwords

After two weeks of running the adwords, we receive over a couple million clicks. Last week we had a click through rate of about 4.5%. For this week, our group will go through and eliminate adwords that are not useful. We will also incorporate new adwords to try to increase our CTR. Also we will be working on our blog marketing plan. More updates coming soon.

Feeling Good

Hello loyal viewers. In class last week the professor informed me and my group that we are currently doing the best in the class on the AdWords Competition. He pointed out a few key price changes we can administer to push us even further in the lead and really dominate the competition. That really gave my group and I the motivation to really step up our strategy to run the table and possibly win the competition. Thanks for keeping up with the AdWords Competition and stay tuned for more updates.

Malik E.

As the competition winds down.....

As the competition winds down we have drastically improved my CTR!  It is .67% much better than it was when we started.  We just hope it is good enough to win.  We have added various AdWords and deleted inefficient ones to better our CTR percentage.  We have learned more from this competitive atmosphere, than we have in any other class.  We can not wait to apply the knowledge gained, to various companies we will soon work for.   

Daniel R

With 8 days left in our campaign, we have spent just over 50% of our budget. We have been fairly succesful in getting clicks in our "Popular Games" category with over 300 hits, so i plan on raising the budget for this AdGroup significantly during the final week. Since this category was so popular i geotargeted it to South Florida during the first week so that it may attract customers to the store. I plan on eliminating the "Resources" category altogether, as it has done nothing to help the campaign.... no point in keeping dead weight. I will use the funds from this category to boost our "In Store Events" category, which has shown some interest; but unfortunately the CPC is high compared to the "Popular Games" category. It is essential to continue this category though as it is more likely to attract good traffic, or visitors who may eventually visit the store in person.

-Jeff

Figuring out what works...

After much anticipation we have finally started our Adwords Campaign. After the first 6 hours in the competition I was able to see and correct words that were not working. I still have a few kinks to work out to get my CPC score above 2%. Stay tuned and hopefully I can turn this campaign, into a well oiled machine!

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This past week in class our professor made sure all the groups had money in their google accounts. Now that we have the necessary funds to proceed with are AdWords campaign we are now ready to make moves!

First Week

After 6 days in the competition, we have had some interesting results. Our "Popular Games" category was far and away the most popular, therefore i geotargeted it just to Florida so that we might attract local people who could potentially use the store. So far we have received over 150 clicks from this category at an average CPC of $0.22. Since the category is so popular, there were over 3 million impressions overall, making the click through rate so low it doesn't even register. Our "In-Store Events" category received very little attention, probably because our page ranking is low due to our small bids, therefore I will increase it to see if improves. Our "Resources" section has received NO attention whatsoever, and it is a complete mystery why; perhaps our group can get some insight on this from our professor tommorow.

-Jeff

Adwords Progress

After a week of having the adwords active, our group will determine which adwords were effective and which ones were not. We will also add new adwords in to get better traffic flow for mygamersworld.net. Also, we will adjust our budgeting so that we do not run out or end up not spending too little on the adwords. More updates coming soon!

Deadline is here......

The deadline is here! Are AdWords Pre-Strategy has to be turned in and many of us are starting are campaigns some already have started. Our group needed the whole time to examine what it is going to take to win. We finally have determined that we needed four AdGroups and two campaigns to enhance our chances. It took a lot of imagination and perseverance to develop our strategy. We just hope it is enough to achieve victory in the up in coming 3 week campaign.

Daniel R

Activating the Account

This week our group is activating the adwords account. After final additions of adwords, the account will be activated and we can start collecting data on our adwords. The data we will collect will determine which adwords are effective and which ones are ineffective. More updates will be coming soon.

Our website has been updated and is back online at mygamersworld.net. The changes to the website design were thankfully very minor and do not affect our pre-campaign strategy. Tommorow we will officially begin our campaign if all goes as planned, so stay tuned for updates very shortly.

Keeping You Posted

Last week we submitted our pre-campaign strategy to Google. Our proffessor went through the steps to submit it with us in class and it was fairly simple. As a group we feel pretty good about our pre campaign strategy. Also our website mygamersworld.net is back up and looking better than ever. Alot of changes were made making the site look cleaner and eaiser to navigate. Thats all the updates I have for you this week please stay tuned.

Malik E.

welcome back!

Developing AdWords Strategy

I have found that when building an AdWords campaign strategy, the most complicated part for me is figuring out which words to use. Capturing the most amount of traffic possible at the least amount of cost has turned out to be a very daunting task. The great thing about it is even though it is a lot of work. I have learned a lot that will be beneficial to my future career in marketing. There are many sites that have also helped in the quest for information. Here are some that have helped me.

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

http://www.nichebotclassic.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

http://www.seoresearchlabs.com/ppcvideo/

http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-list/generator.php

http://www.goodkeywords.com/

http://keyworddiscovery.com/

https://www.wordtracker.com/trial/

http://www.spyfu.com

http://tools.seobook.com/spelling/keywords-typos.cgi

http://adwords.blogspot.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/TrafficEstimatorSandbox

http://www.google.com/adwords/learningcenter/

http://www.seobook.com/overture-adwords.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqFzEBXFTXQ&feature=channel_page

We anticipate our site to be up within the next few days following some maintenance. During the first week of the competition we will be using 3 different AdWords categories in attempt to draw visitors to the website. The first will be popular game titles and consoles, so we will use keywords based on the most popular games and consoles to attract a broader audience to the site. An example of this will be "killzone 2 ps3." We will also have another category based on the resources the site has to offer, such as a forum and game reviews. An example keyword for this category would be "street fighter 4 review" or "video game forum." For the last group, we will use geotargeting to attract visitors to local happenings withing the store, such as tournaments, birthday parties, or LAN parties. Example keywords here would include "kids birthday party Hialeah," "LAN party Hialeah," or "Madden tournament Florida." Overall, we expect to use over 1,000 of these keywords to attract visitors, and we plan to update on which keywords are most effective. Look for updates shortly.

-Jeff

Adword Funding Strategy

For our funding of this competition, our group will be given two hundred dollars to use on adwords. To allocate these funds efficiently, on the first day we will start off around twenty dollars. The second day we will decrease our daily spending depending on which adwords were found to be most effective from the first day. This process will continue on until our group has found which adwords benefit our website the most. More updates coming soon.

Spring Break Update

As you already know from the post from my main man Jeff our site gamers world is down due to maintnence. Even though this is a miner set back we are eager to get back to work and make further progress on this project. I hope all of our loyal visitors are having a great spring break!Malik E.

Spring Break 2009

Florida Atlantic University is celebrating Spring Break 2009 this week as we hit the mid point of the semester. It is no break for the Internet Marketing students here because our AdWords Campaign Pre-Strategy is due very soon. At this point, we have three ad groups and one campaign. We are not sure if this is going to be enough to ensure the online dominance that it is going to take to win this competition. Can 6,000 keywords really be enough to win the big prize? This is some of the anxiety that is expressed by my group. We are determined to win this extravagant competition, even if that means no fun on Spring Break.

Daniel R

Sorry for the lack of delays in the last week or so, the site we are working on (mygamersworld.net) has been taken down for a few days due to maintenance. We look forwards to continuing with progress updates shortly.


-Jeff

Adwords Integration

After establishing our pre-campaign strategy for mygamersworld.net, this week our team will be focusing on integrating the adwords. The adwords we will be using will be related to the video game industry as well as what mygamersworld.net specializes in-store. We will add more than a thousand adwords to our project. Within the next week after that, we will gather information on what adwords are working for us and what adwords are not relavent. This is an important step in the Google Adwords Challenge. Expect to see more information on this topic with frequent updates.

Whats New

Hello everyone out there. Sorry for the lack of post but I'm here to bring you some news about our latest progress on the AdWords Competition. You may not know but as a group we were assigned to turn in a Pre-campaign strategy for our AdWords Project. The Pre-campaign strategy consisted of Client profile, a market analysis, current market, and proposed strategy. Our professor emailed us back our Pre-campaign strategy with a minimal amount of corrections and he informed us that we are on the right track.

Please stay tuned for more updates
Malik E.

Pre-Strategy

Does anyone really know what it takes to win this competition? I have come to realize that the AdWords competition we are in is highly competitive. I think everyone wants a chance to fly to Google and meet the famous icon that started one of the most successful and interesting companies on the planet. In writing the campaign pre-strategy I have found it very difficult in writing a winning strategy. However, I hope to make strides and come out a winner in the end. I chose a company that represents a new age in board games and online gaming. The company is Mindgammon Inc. founded by two entrepreneurs that need help getting traffic to there website cost effectively. I hope to take http://www.mindgammon.com/ and http://www.mindgammon.net/ to the next level in online traffic, with a limited budget.

Welcome!

Welcome to our Google AdWords Competition blog. Our team of four is in the process of beginning our very first AdWords competition, so this is where we will be keeping a journal of our progress. We will post updates about not only our progress, but detail each of our strategies and the successes and failures of each strategy, something we don't think you will find elsewhere. We hope visitors who are also new to AdWords will benefit from the information we present, and to those who are more experienced with AdWords... we will gladly take any advice! Within the next few days we will post information about our campaign strategy, our Ad Group categories, and our initial strategies.

I should also mention that we are basing our campaign on a video game store located in Hialeah, Florida. The store is named Gamers World and they have a website at www.mygamersworld.net/

-Jeff