Day 2: Thursday 09 May 2013

After a daunting first day of launching our campaign we are becoming more comfortable with analysing the figures such as CTRs and CPCs in a practical, rather than merely theoretical level. We are noticing that certain planning, such as our keyword choices, will have to be amended to be more successful.

While we thought certain keyword phrases, especially within our “Church Group” AdGroup, were clear, we have noted that many keyword phrases such as “safe travel” and “eastern cape” are in fact below the first page bid. We will, as a team, assess which of these keywords are most valuable to our campaign and the specific AdGroup and then proceed to allocate more than the $0.60 max CPC for valuable keywords.

We have paused a few keywords such as “bus hire for group” which proved to have a low search volume. After the next group meeting we shall decide how to move forward with low search volume keywords as well as the keyword bidding issue to get our Ads more exposure.

At this early stage we hope to repair low search volume keywords and increase certain bids to achieve as much valuable publicity for our company as possible.

We have realised that our initial theoretical planning will indeed change a great deal in practice. The very real circumstances of our campaign and the competitive nature of the online marketing for transport companies will require approaches and amendments to the emphasis we place on keywords that we may not have considered.

We are learning as we go along while using the knowledge we gained in our readings and research done before the campaign in a practical and meaningful way.

Over the next few days we aim to: analyse the CPCs of keywords in each AdGroup and increase bids accordingly, hopefully getting some Ads to the top of the search results page. Currently, one of our main competitors, Rhode Trip, is featuring first when one searches with keywords such as “student transport grahamstown”. Pending a reanalysis of our daily spending and where we focus our budget, we shall begin to spend less on areas which are not getting any attention, whilst spending more on areas which could get more clicks with better exposure.

We have also contacted the webmaster of the company’s website to get the conversion tracking implemented on the page which appears after a customer makes an online booking. We hope that this will help us measure our final conversions.

 

At the end of the day we shall look at the general impressions, clicks, CTRs as well as considering the growth/decline of unique visitors to the company’s website by analysing the Google Analytics. In this way we can judge how successful our efforts have been so far and how we can improve.