Divide and Conquer!

Snapshot
A week feels like a year in this project. The above graphic illustrates a few things - India, Canada, and Western Europe have been really good for us. We chose to axe Mexico, not solely because it was under performing, but also to reallocate our budget. China's been the black sheep of our ad words family, giving is very mixed results. China's paused right now while we figure out what we need to do with it.

India is our Slumdog Millionare (how ironic...)
We mentioned in our second post that we had four main ad groups, and that one of them was curriculum. For India, we've had tremendous success by breaking down that subcategory into a smaller group of adwords groups. Instead of having "Curriculum", we broke it down into curriculum specializations: marketing, management, finance, and human resources.

Here's what India's breakdown looks like (CTR in brackets):
Human Resources: 15 hits/1,095 impressions (1.37%)
Finance: 12 hits/1,262 impressions (0.95%)
Management: 8 hits/770 impressions (1.04%)
Marketing: 4 hits/517 impressions (0.77%)
Curriculum: 2 hits/1,327 impressions (0.15%)

The takeaway here was to really attack niche searches. It obviously takes a while to research and setup, but the benefits are huge. If you look at the hits alone, for the individual specializations together compared to curriculum as a whole, you've got a ratio of 39:2. That's almost 20x the results we would've had from our initial strategy.

- Team Sauder

Remember when we had money?

There goes the money...
Our strategy is pretty simple - spend a lot at the beginning with a broad range of words and groups, see what works, and refine. So far, we've spent around 1/3 of our budget, with just over 2 weeks to go, so we're pretty much right where we want to be. Our CTR isn't nearly where we want it to be (*HINT - it's not 0, but it rounds to it), but we're all pretty confident that we'll be able to drive that up in the latter two weeks.

Break it down
Our geographic breakdown for CTR's is as follows (all rounded) -
Canada: 1.51% (400 impressions) - $3.00
China: 0.1% (80,900 impressions) - $35.00
India: 0.5% (4,300 impressions) - $18.50
Mexico: 0.19% (5,200 impressions) - $7.00
Western Europe: 0.22% (900 impressions) - $1.30

Till the next one.

- Team Sauder

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3... (and again, and again)

Our Initial Strategy
We're a little over 24 hours into the competition, and so far, we're getting mixed results. A little breakdown for you as to our plan of attack.


So, we're initially targeting five regions: India, Canada, Western Europe, Mexico, and China. For each region, we're more or less breaking it down into 4 main ad groups: curriculum, length of program, value for money, and sustainability. There's obviously more to it than that, but that's the jist of our plan of attack for promoting Sauder's MBA program.

What We're Seeing Right Now


For eachgroup, we're heavily testing different messages, refining the chosen words, and reapplying a new line of text. Less than 24 hours in, we were able to see that there's a big difference in China and India's respective recognition towards Sauder. Sauder advertises in China, so the Sauder School of Business is known considerably better there than in India, and the adwords results so far reflect this. When the "Sauder" name is tied into the ad message in China, you tend to see more attention in terms of click throughs, whereas the exact opposite occurs in India.

That's it for now.

- Team Sauder

Welcome to Our Blog

This blog is dedicated to our entry in the 2009 Google Online Marketing Challenge.

The Premise
We've been given a Google Adwords budget of $200. As our client, we've chosen the business school where we all attend - the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia.

Our Blog
We're focusing specifically on promoting their full-time MBA program. As a part of our strategy, we'll initially be focusing on China, India, Mexico, Western Europe, and select parts of Canada. In the coming three weeks, we hope to post regularly about the trends we notice, the changes we make, and our eventual results.

- Team Sauder