Skycasters Assists Marketing Students through AdWords
Skycasters is helping the Bowling Green State University marketing class team (FalcoLytics) learn online marketing (read our press release).
A BGSU grad myself, and a member of their Marketing Advisory Council since 1997, I’m inviting the three BGSU team leads to post their strategies, powerpoints, and exams (findings & analyses) to this blog entry.
That way you (interested in premier broadband satellite Internet, or just interested) can see the progress we’re making in training the next workforce to help this Nation get back in fiscal shape.
The campaign schedule:
4/7 - 4/14 kickoff, and planning
4/14 FalcoLytics proposal teleconference
4/17 & 4/20 48 hr test on AdWords concepts
4/23 FalcoLytics Pitch
4/23-29 Campaign
5/4 Exam (final campaign overview and analytics analysis due)
Watch this space!
4/13 - Pre-campaign strategy documents posted
4/14 - Feedback given to teams, targets focused
4/15 - All landing page outlines received
4/16 - All landing page outlines posted
4/17 - Let the testing begin!
4/23 - Team presentations made, final budgets assigned
5/4 - Results presented and posted (see attached in comments)
April 13th, 2009 at 10:03 am
Education Team (Megan, Ann, Olivia, Todd) pre-campaign strategy.
Client Overview
Skycasters is a leader in broadband satellite internet solutions created in 2001 and located in Akron, Ohio. The company’s website is http://www.skycasters.com/. Skycasters has a limited number of employees, but these employees will guarantee great customer service with “in-source” support through answering questions, paying bills, and dealing with accounts. Skycasters offers satellite internet service to a vast variety of clients. Skycasters’ internet service is delivered with products such as fixed equipment, which includes a modem, dish, and transmitter. The company also provides clients with mobile equipment that can be hooked onto a car, or driven on a trailer. The company has a large presence in both online and offline channels being one of the only satellite internet companies in the industry. Skycasters sales are broken down into 80% resulting from sales to remote locations including gas, oil and mining and also businesses located off the grid. 10% of its sales are resulted from disaster response and the last 10% are from business continuity, which acts as a backup for companies already operating with a terrestrial internet service.
Market Analysis
Skycasters’ clients include disaster response, oil, gas, and mining, business continuity, and remote businesses. They act as a primary server for areas of the world that are unable to receive terrestrial internet connection and a backup server for businesses served by terrestrial internet. Through the broadband stimulus package, Skycasters has expanded their clientele to include health care, education, and communities. Education will be our main focus throughout this project. The company has limited competition because of the infrastructure that needs to be built to run the business. One of Skycasters’ competitors is Huesnet, however; this company focuses more on residential services and offers a low cost in return for low quality. Another competitor, Schlumberger, focuses its attention on the area of oil, gas, and mining. Most other competitors to the company are merely resellers of Huesnet equipment under a different name. Skycasters is the only company of its kind that focuses on many different areas of business that do not have access to internet service through terrestrial internet. They differentiate themselves by being one of the only companies that focus on customer needs and build a product to fit the company. As an example, Skycasters have added backup plans to the equipment they sell to customers in case of a shortage or emergency.
Current Marketing
The Skycasters website is used to transfer information about the company and its products to potential clients. It breaks down the different divisions of business that the company focuses on and explains how their product can better serve your needs. The website explains how satellite internet works and what sets Skycasters apart from the others. It also gives present and potential customers a way to contact the company and allows present customers to pay their bills online. The website is very strong; it breaks down this complex scientific product in a way that everyone is able to understand. It separates the business into four parts so that a client does not have to search through each page of the website to find what they are looking for. Skycasters is available through searches on Google; it also has a Google AdWords program already up and running which takes you to the company home page.
The new AdWords campaign will be designed to focus on the recently passed Broadband Stimulus Plan. The plan was passed through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and will assist the E-Rate program in bringing free internet service to all educational institutions around the country. Through the AdWords campaign we hope to educate schools, libraries, and community centers about the new plan, and how they can receive satellite internet for free.
Proposed AdWords Strategy
For our AdWords strategy we have decided to focus on two Ad Groups. The first Ad Group will be focused primarily on schools, grades kindergarten through eighth. This is the main area that the E-Rate plan pertains to, so this will be our larger Ad Group obtaining a majority of impressions. Our second Ad Group will focus on libraries and community centers. An example of some of the keywords we will include to direct people to our Ad Groups include E-Rate, enhancing education, enhancing education through technology (EETT), No Child Left Behind Act, broadband stimulus package, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), school grants, education, broadband, underprivileged schools, broadband stimulus act. We believe that many of these keywords are specific to Skycasters needs so that we will not have an overabundance of impressions not leading to clicks. We have developed Ad Group text for our two different Ad Groups. Our Ad Groups will then direct visitors to the satellite internet E-Rate plan on Skycasters website.
The Ad Group text will focus on both the E-Rate plan and the Broadband Stimulus package. For the school Ad Group our text will read:
Stimulate Your Education
Skycasters brings the internet to you
Click here for E-Rate information
Our Ad Group text for libraries and community centers will focus on the Broadband package and will read:
Read All About It!
Broadband funding for libraries
Contact Skycasters for grant help
Our daily and weekly plans for spending the campaign budget are subject to change based on the amount of money rewarded. However, for the test campaign our strategy is to spend the $100 equally separating it into $50 per day for two days. For the actual campaign we will administer the money unequally giving a limited amount of money on Friday and spending the majority of the money Monday through Wednesday. We believe this will be key because most schools and school systems will be doing more work earlier in the week then they would be on Friday. Also, since most of our target audience will be at work from 8 AM to 3 PM (approximately) we will adjust our ad to show on Google around these times (from 4 PM-12 AM then again from 5 AM-8 or 9 AM). The purpose of this is so that we are only reaching the potential customers who will actually take interest in our message and will lessen the amount of irrelevant clicks. We will locate our Ad Groups in the Google content network only. The audience we are trying to target through this project will be educators, school boards, library personnel, and adults ages 25 to 60. In order to focus on a broader group we will target rural and urban communities that do not have access to broadband internet service. Through Ad Serving we will use Google Analytics to track the number of visitors coming to the site, the number of times they visited, and the length of time they spent on the site. With this information we will be able to receive insight on whether or not our Ad Groups are bringing potential customers to the site.
Through Geotargeting will be able to specify the regions of the country, which we believe will benefit the most from the E-Rate and Broadband Stimulus package. We have decided to focus our target on the top 10 states in the country that use the E-Rate most often. These states include New York, California, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, and Arizona. We believe that these states will be highly interested in applying for the Broadband stimulus package because they are already educated with the E-Rate package. Also, these are the more populated of the 50 states so we believe a great deal of schools and communities in these states may be underprivileged. We have planned to start our keyword bidding at $3 and increase depending on the price of the keywords we are focusing on. Our goals for impressions and clicks are 10,000 impressions and 150 clicks over the four day period. Therefore, we will receive a 1.5% click through rate over the period. We will also list our CPC at $1.50.
Conclusion
Overall, our group hopes to conduct a successful advertising campaign throughout the duration of the four-day period. We aim to help Skycasters benefit from our campaign by increasing awareness about broadband satellite and informing schools and libraries about the E-Rate plan. The E-Rate plan will ensure that U.S. students will have a chance at an equal quality education – through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – by providing an alternative for schools, libraries and community centers that need more than traditional terrestrial landlines.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Mike:
Attached is our pre-campaign paper on Skycasters for our Google AdWords campaign.
We look forward to talking with you tomorrow.
Thank you,
Megan Bockbrader
Katy Burkholder
Lauren Schumacher
Stephanie Tanner
CLIENT PROFILE______
Skycasters is a broadband satellite internet provider that focuses on delivering superior customer service and a stainable service to its customers and people in need. Skycasters is located in Akron, Ohio along with its Network Operations Center (NOC) which is where they monitor satellite signals, performance issues, and power failures.
Skycasters offers several services as a satellite internet provider. Their business offers services to four different areas of clients being disaster response, oil, gas, and mining, business continuity, and remote business. They have been in business for eight years, formed in early 2001.
Skycasters’ website is well developed and updated. It provides a great deal of information on the business and their processes. Potential customers and interested parties are able to navigate very easily through the website to find any type of information about the business and services available.
MARKET ANALYSIS _____
Skycasters has a variety of customers ranging from corporate, government, education, and non-profits who have chosen them to provide satellite Internet and data services. The goal for the Google AdWords campaign is to look for partnership opportunities and develop relationships that will lead to business. The campaign will focus on the opportunity of community customers.
Currently Skycasters does not face many competitors since they offer a very unique service that not many other businesses serve. This has given Skycasters a competitive advantage. There are only two other companies that currently offer similar services and they are HughesNet and Schlumberger. It is possible that other current internet providers may begin to see the market for satellite internet and could become potential competitors.
The broadband satellite internet industry is very mature in that it requires a great deal of knowledge to fully understand its concept. Unique selling points for Skycasters are their sustainability, reliable service, and exceptional customer service.
CURRENT MARKETING _____
The website for Skycasters is intricate, in depth and yet still easy to navigate; this is quite an accomplishment in the world wide web. It is used for information and customer service. They do a great job at providing all the information a person could think of asking for and yet not being overwhelming with too much text or clutter. Another nice feature is that some words have question marks next to them and provide a definition for the reader to help them better understand. One thing that is a little arduous is all the technical verbiage; especially in our target market, these people have not had internet so they would be very unfamiliar and may be turned off or confused by the process. The pictures and diagrams are useful in aiding in these confusing explanations, and they break up the text for the reader.
The website is not the only passage of information for Skycasters. They use Adwords ads, a feature on Google, to create awareness and direct traffic to the website. The ad doesn’t provide much information but anyone interested in satellite internet will be able to click through and receive the information they need. Skycasters also have press releases which share information on the company, and give updates on new projects which are currently occurring. This is beneficial for those who do not access the web regularly, or for those who do not have web access, they can learn about Skycasters and find out how to solve their communication problems. It is also good that the website appears on these press releases in order to encourage as much traffic to the website as possible.
Also directing traffic to the website are search engines such as Google. When Skycasters is searched as a keyword, the Adwords ad is the only one that appears and the website is the first of the organic results. When satellite internet is typed in, it is the sixth Adwords ad under sponsored links and appears fifth under the organic results. If “internet in remote locations” is entered in the search bar, Skycasters’ website appears second on the second page or results. Entering this as a keyword for our Adwords ad may potentially help those in communities where internet is not available find out about the possibilities of satellite internet access.
Skycasters is a complex company with many objectives, all which result in helping people get connected. This campaign would help those communities who cannot afford internet, or who are unable to get internet through traditional terrestrial landlines by creating awareness about ARRA. This stands for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and this act is giving grant money to these groups of people in order to give everyone affordable broadband access and help kick start the nation through a number of programs.
PROPOSED ADWORDS STRATEGY _____
For Skycasters there will be two different ad groups that focus on the area of communities as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The first ad group will be targeted to attracting customers. The second ad will center on gaining partnerships with other internet providers.
Positive Keywords
• Skycasters
• Remote Internet Access
• Reliable Internet
• Broadband
• Affordable Internet
• Satellite Internet Service
• Community Internet
• Internet Service in the ARRA
• Community Internet Access
• Satellite Community Internet
• Internet Solutions
• Full-time Broadband Internet Service
• American Recovery Reinvestment Act
• Satellite Internet Partnerships
• Stimulus Internet Package
• Skycasters Internet Access
Negative Keywords
• HughesNet
• DSL internet connections
• Cable internet
Attracting Customers Text
Affordable Internet Access for
Remote Locations and Communities.
http://www.Skycasters.com
Budget
The goal for the two day trial is to spend around $50 a day. It is important to see how the keywords are working and to make changes at this time before a large amount of the money has been spent. The goal is to effectively use the $100 budget to see what changes need to be made and what is working the best.
Networks
This campaign will not include any content ads, on different networks. For the client networks like Facebook and MySpace would not be appropriate and could generate a lot of unnecessary clicks that would not turn into conversions.
Audience
The first ad will be geared towards people living in remote locations that are not currently being served by cable internet providers. This would include islands, mountains, and people living on the ice road. The second ad will appeal to businesses that would like to partner with Skycasters to provide internet access to remote communities. The ad will also help to attract customers who currently cannot afford internet, since that is a main goal of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Ad servicing
Since there will be a trial run of the ads before the actually campaign takes place, using the budget optimizer would be a good tool to use. This way we can see what ad is doing the best and the better performing keywords, so when we run the actual campaign we know that we have a good performing ad. By doing this we can reevaluate the ad(s) that are performing well and can then make any necessary changes before the campaign is launched. When we launch the campaign the ads will be under the rotate option, which will show the ads evenly and not just focus on high performing ads, this way we don’t use up the money too fast.
Keyword Bidding
The bidding will start at 1.51 and be monitored closely and adjusted a number of times during the pre-campaign. This will be done as keywords are changed and deleted. This will ensure that the budget is being spent wisely.
Geotargeting
The audience for this ad campaign would be the United States, Canada and the Caribbean.
Goals for Impressions
The goal for the pre-campaign is 5,000 impressions and 12,000 for the campaign itself. The number of impressions should go up during the real campaign because the keywords will have already been changed to help maximize exposure.
Success Metrics
The success of the ad group will be determined by an increase in calls and emails to Skycasters regarding internet access in remote locations be both customers and potential partners.
April 13th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Pre-Campaign AdWords Strategy for Skycasters
by Healthcare Team (Aaron, Andrew, Carolyn, Lindsay)
Client Overview:
Skycasters, a broadband satellite internet access provider out of Akron, Ohio, has been providing services since 2001. Currently, Skycasters has been focusing their services on four main areas: remote business, oil/gas/mining companies, disaster response, and business continuity. Half of their business comes from remote businesses which are mainly comprised of someone running a company out of their home in a remote location. The Oil/gas/mining focus of Skycasters makes up the next largest part of their business at 30%. Almost all locations for oil/gas/mining are in remote locations and by utilizing Skycasters’ services they can stay connected to the rest of the world. Skycasters brings them not only internet service, but also keep them connected to a phone. Our client has realized the unpredictability of weather and has used that to design a program designated specifically for disaster response units. Having a mobile internet connection that can be brought to the scene of any devastation can help decrease response time and also keep victims and disaster aids. The fourth aspect of Skycasters focuses on is business continuity. Taking advantage of Skycasters back-up program would be very beneficial to any company that relies strongly on terrestrial internet. If for some reason a company lost their internet connection, they could be back online very quickly by just letting Skycasters know that they want their account to be active. Our client has made satellite backup internet a relatively inexpensive way to ensure internet continuity by charging a lower monthly fee for this type of use.
Market Analysis:
Skycasters is the business of selling broadband internet access, therefore in a very broad sense they are competing with any corporation that offer broadband communications access. Therefore, Skycasters is competing with industry giants like AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Netzero, and Time Warner. However, most of these high speed internet communications providers offer strictly terrestrial connections to receive broadband access. Therefore, Skycasters and a few other select organizations are attempting to cut out a niche in the market for high-speed broadband communications by offering strictly satellite broadband access. The extreme differences in the infrastructure of the two connections types, terrestrial and satellite, makes it a bit easier for Skycasters to separate itself for these industry giants. However, this smaller niche market is still relatively competitive due to strong competitors like Hughesnet.
Yet, Skycasters can also distinguish itself from other satellite providers like Hughesnet due to the fact that unlike other satellite communications providers, everything in their infrastructure is business-grade and company-owned. The equipment in Skycasters network is designed to meet the unique challenges of their customer’s industry, no matter how rugged the conditions. Plus, their 24/7 tech support and customer service is handled in-house by experts who can resolve any issue that may arise.
Additionally, Skycasters, more than any other service provider, is interested in our countries future. This is why the company is creating an entire advertising campaign dedicated to informing organizations and community leaders all across America of the government funding that can be received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Skycasters hopes to team up with other service providers and the United States government to helps underprivileged and underserved organizations and communities in America receive broadband access as a way to further our nation’s education, healthcare, and unify our communities.
Proposed AdWords Strategy:
The first element of our strategy we need to consider is our target market. Skycasters is an international organization; therefore they have a worldwide customer base. However, our client has requested that our campaign is to focus solely on American healthcare organizations that are eligible to receive federal grant money from the recent American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). Consequently, to determine our target market, we need to consider what the criteria are for a healthcare organization to be eligible for funding from this government grant. According to Title VI of the ARRA, any organization that requests grant money as part of the broadband technology opportunities program must be considered either underprivileged or underserved based on their current broadband capabilities or lack thereof. Therefore, the overarching purpose of our campaign is to identify these underprivileged or underserved facilities and inform them of the opportunity Title VI of the ARRA provides. This will serve as an incentive for the target consumers to subscribe to internet service.
To maximize our campaign’s effectiveness, we have broken this extensive target market into three different ad groups. The first ad group will concentrate on hospitals and other healthcare facilities that are currently lacking sufficient broadband communications. We will emphasize the necessity of having broadband capabilities do to the emergence of electronic medical records and the movement of a paper-free healthcare system in America. We will inform these facilities of the government assistance available to them and how Skycasters can help to prepare their institution for the future of healthcare communications in a cost effective way. One example of an ad copy we will use in this ad group is listed below:
Skycasters Communication
EMRs & EHRs are the future, update
your hospital with government funds
http://www.skycasters.com/
*Note: The landing page for this advertisement will be the Skycasters homepage.
Additionally, this ad group will contain keywords such as, “electronic medical records”, “electronic health records”, “EMR”, “EHR”, and of course buzz words like “broadband communication” and “ARRA”. However, as with all of the keywords in our ad groups, what keywords we actually choose to use is dependent on the cost associated to them through the keyword bidding process. It is worth noting that we anticipate this ad group to provide the smallest amount of potential customers for Skycasters given the ubiquitous nature of broadband internet in the United States. We still believe this group is worth pursuing considering the additional revenue Skycasters can obtain by being the primary broadband service provider to a facility as opposed to a backup provider.
The second ad group in our campaign will be directed at healthcare facilities that already have a terrestrial broadband provider as their primary broadband communications provider, however they either lack a backup provider all together or have failed to diversify their two providers and have both terrestrial broadband suppliers. In the case of the facility having no backup provider whatsoever, we need to emphasize the importance of having a backup on standby. These ad copies should stress that disasters and severe weather happen all the time, often without sufficient notice, and no internet provider can guarantee service 100% of the time. However, in the latter situation where the healthcare facility has failed to differentiate between their primary and secondary providers by using only terrestrial suppliers, our ad copy will display how different the satellite and terrestrial broadband infrastructures are. We will underline the fact that there is little overlap between terrestrial and satellite broadband access when referring to situations that cause a failed connection. We will show that this little overlap of failed connection causes will limit the chances of having situations where no broadband connection is available. Finally, our ad copies in this particular sect of ad group will specify the cost benefits of using Skycasters as your backup connection due to Skycasters new “pay when you use” program that provides backup access for as little as $59 per month. The following is one example of an ad in this particular ad group:
Is Your Internet Reliable
Ensure Broadband Access, Diversify
Your Network With Satellite Backup
http://www.skycasters.com/
*Note: The landing page for this advertisement will be the Business Continuity page on the Skycasters website.
Some potential keywords for this group include “backup internet systems”, “secondary broadband access”, and various combinations of these two. Additionally, we will use buzz words like “ARRA” and “broadband communications.” Once again the keywords we actually choose to use are dependent on the cost associated to them through the keyword bidding process. We anticipate this ad group will draw the largest number of potential customers to Skycasters. Therefore, we plan to allocate a larger percentage of our overall budget to this ad group.
The third and final ad grouping will be designed to target mobile healthcare facilities. We recognize that the number of mobile health care programs is growing and we believe this provides Skycasters with a unique opportunity to establish itself as the leading broadband internet provider to such programs all across the United States. This ad group will feature all of the benefits of mobile broadband access that only Skycasters can provide. Features such as portability, flexible service plans, state-of-the-art technology, and equipment that can be deployed at the push of a button, will be emphasized. We envision an ad for this ad group that would resemble the following:
Need Mobile Broadband?
Skycasters offers mobile satellite
Boardband at the push of a button
http://www.skycasters.com/
*Note: The landing page for this advertisement will be the Disaster Response page on the Skycasters website.
A few potential keywords for this group could include a combination of several strategic words like “mobile”, “portable”, “broadband”, “Internet”, and “satellite.” We anticipate that this ad group will fall between the first and second ad groups in terms of the number of potential customers that could contact Skycasters as a result of our advertisement. Therefore, we plan to allocate slightly more of our budget to this ad group than ad group 1, yet slightly less than group 2.
Now that we have reviewed what our ads will look like, potential keywords we will use, and our landing pages we will briefly discuss how we plan to manage our campaign and ultimately what our goals for the campaign are.
We will initially use Google’s budget optimizer to bid on keywords. Once we see how our keywords are performing, based on CTR and quality of traffic indictors, we will then manually bid on keywords for the remainder of the AdWords campaign. These manual bids will be carefully calculated by determining the expected conversions from each keyword. Another important piece to a successful AdWords campaign is managing where we would like our ads to be seen. In addition to having our ads placed on the Google Search Network, we will also place them on the Google Content Network in an attempt to acquire potential customers who are viewing sites related to our client’s product. To monitor the effectiveness of our ad copy on the content network, we will routinely run placement reports to view where our traffic originates from. This will aid in identifying whether or not the websites where our ad copy is placed would likely generate any prospective customers. We will also utilize Google Analytics to help us gain a better insight into where our website viewers are coming from and which pages they are viewing the most.
Finally, we have decided to set relatively lofty goals for our campaign considering the short time duration in which our ads will be shown. However, we believe these goals are attainable if we monitor the ads and keywords closely and make adjustments when necessary. Our goal is to receive 5,000 impressions during the 4 days our campaign will be run. More importantly, we seek to attain a CTR of 5% for a total of 250 clicks. Our success metric will be determined by the number of sales inquirers Skycasters receives as a result of our campaign. We realize this may be difficult to determine but our hope is that Skycasters sales team can help us measure this number by asking all inquiring customers how they heard of Skycasters.
Conclusion:
We believe by using strategic planning and carefully monitoring our campaign we will successfully reach our campaign goals, while ultimately increasing the customer base of Skycasters. The campaign is closely aligned with Skycasters’ business interests and structured to reach Skycasters desired healthcare target market. Our campaign will benefit our client not only by attracting customers in the short term but by generating consumer awareness of Skycasters and their products.
April 14th, 2009 at 11:30 am
Great teleconference with the teams today. I am very encouraged by the thoughts and strategy I am seeing out of the group.
Based on today’s conversation, we are narrowing the focus of each team even further. This will allow the team to concentrate on good, targeted strategy, rather than having to develop and implement against multiple strategic goals.
The Healthcare Team will be focusing on enabling Electronic Medical Records and the connectivity that is required. The Communities Team will be focusing on developing partnership relationships with other technology vendors that are complimentary to Skycasters. The Education Team will be focusing on bringing broadband to schools, specifically those who would qualify under the E-Rate program.
Each team has also expressed interest in creating dedicated landing pages within the Skycasters site for their campaigns. This will give them the opportunity to more fully develop their strategy and expand the concepts on the site. We are looking forward to receiving outlines of the landing page strategy from each team later today or tomorrow.
-MK
April 14th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
From: Aaron Neal
Sent: Tuesday, April 14, 2009 5:02 PM
To: mike
Subject: BGSU Healthcare Team
Mr. Kister,
My group members and I would like to thank you and Gordon for taking the time to talk with us this morning. The feedback you provided will be very helpful in structuring our campaign. We are all excited about this opportunity to work with a real client. The first-hand experience that you are affording us will be truly beneficial in our future careers.
We are currently constructing our landing page and we hope to have it completed and sent to you sometime tomorrow. Will we be able to include a Google Analytics code on our landing page as a way to help track visitor information such as bounce rates and visitor loyalty? We believe this information will be useful in determining the overall effectiveness of our landing page.
Thank You,
Aaron Neal, Andrew Baney, Carolyn Nesline, Lindsay Squier (Healthcare)
April 14th, 2009 at 11:32 pm
Mike and Gordon-
Thank you very much for taking time this morning to talk to our group. We appreciated your feedback and have considered it greatly while developing a better analysis of our campaign. As discussed we feel it would be beneficial if a landing page was designed specifically for developing partnerships. Listed below are the most important concepts that we feel should be included on the page.
1. Information on ARRA- This will be the page that people are directed to after clicking on the Google Ad and there needs to be information explaining the ARRA for those who may not be familiar with its details.
2. Benefits of the ARRA
3. Who Skycasters is looking for as partners
4. How does someone participate if they are interested in partnering
5. Contact information for people who are interested
If there is any other additional information or details that you need, please let us know. Thank you again for your time this morning and we look forward to hearing back from you.
Thank you,
Megan Bockbrader
Katy Burkholder
Lauren Schumacher
Stephanie Tanner
April 15th, 2009 at 8:51 am
Good Morning, Megan (and Communities Team),
You’re on the right track here. I would recommend that “Benefits of ARRA” be changed to “Benefits of Partnering with Skycasters.”
Juggling the order a bit, the outline should be:
1) Information on ARRA
1a) Helping communities draft grant applications
1b) Providing technical implementation to Grant Recipients
2) Skycasters Partnerships (types of companies we are partnering with)
3) Benefits of Partnering with Skycasters (the role that Skycasters plays as part of the solution)
4) Getting Started - How do you partner with Skycasters?
5) Contact Information
For the sake of time, we will move forward with implementing the first draft of this page today and forward to you for review/commentary. Please continue development of your campaign strategy and recommended implementation against that strategy, so that you will be ready to begin testing on Friday.
All the best,
-Mike
April 15th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Good Afternoon, Aaron (Healthcare Team),
Regarding the Google Analytics, you will need to set up an Analytics account associated with your adwords account. Once that has been done, Google will provide you a snippet of JavaScript associated with the Analytics account.
Please email that code to us, and Matt Stetka of our engineering team (cc’d on this email), will include it on our site. We will include the Analytics code on all pages of the Skycasters site, so you will be able to track activity throughout the site, not just on your landing page.
-Mike
April 15th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Hello Mr. Kister and Mr. Landefeld,
We (the healthcare group) have attached an outline for our landing page on the Skycasters website. Let us know if you have any questions! Thanks again!
Sincerely,
Andrew Baney
Aaron Neal
Carolyn Nesline
Lindsay Squier
Landing Page Outline:
· Discuss ARRA
o Purpose of the bill is to invest in America’s infrastructure in an effort to stimulate economic growth.
· Division B Title VI -BROADBAND TECHNOLOGY OPPORTUNITIES PROGRAM
o Offers 7.2 billion dollars in government funding towards providing underprivileged and underserved schools, libraries, medical and healthcare providers, community colleges and other institutions of higher education
· What this mean for your hospital or medical facility?
o If your facility does not have access to high speed broadband communications, you are eligible to receive government grants that will pay to update your current broadband access or lack thereof.
· Why does our facility need high speed broadband communication access?
o Do to the emergence of electronic medical records and the movement of a paper-free healthcare system in America.
o According to ABC news, President Obama has been quoted in saying the government will push for electronic health records for all Americans within five years in order to save both dollars and lives.
o The ARRA provides your medical facility with the opportunity to use government funds to prepare for the future healthcare.
· How Skycasters can help.
o Skycasters provides high-speed satellite broadband communications to remote locations around the world.
o Therefore, no matter where your facility is located, we can provide you with broadband access at the push of a button (maybe slightly exaggerated, we were hoping to give some sort of time reference here) via a 1.2 meter satellite dish. Whereas with a terrestrial line, you will have to wait months maybe even years to lay enough fiber optic cable to connect to high-speed broadband.
· Contact information and service plans
April 15th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Good Afternoon, Andrew (and Healthcare Team),
This is strong work. As far as a timeframe, we can deploy throughout the US within 10 days. We will modify your outline to reflect this.
You have given us enough to work with, that we will go ahead and put the ARRA Healthcare landing page up yet today.
Congratulations to the team. You continue to deliver.
-Mike
April 15th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Dear Mike,
The education team has been working diligently on providing a recommendation for the education section landing page. Please find our proposal attached, and as always, feel free to contact us with any questions you may have. We look forward to executing a successful campaign for Skycasters.
Ann Criqui
BGSU FalcoLytics
Education Team (Todd Chiarelott, Olivia Szilagyi and Megan Svat)
——–
Option 1) Our team proposes that a link to a new page, the new page being the 2009 ARRA (detailed below*), be added on the 2009 Broadband Stimulus Plan page. On the 2009 Broadband Stimulus Plan page, in the second sentence, the phrase “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)” could link to this new ARRA page. The new ARRA page would contain more detailed information (detailed below*).
Option 2) Instead of or in addition to this first option, a link could be placed under the “2009 broadband stimulus plan” link in the lefthand navigation. This link could be titled “2009 american recovery and reinvestment act” or “2009 arra,” and would link to the same ARRA page named in Option 1.
*2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Skycasters is dedicated to extending the accessibility of broadband internet access to all Americans through the newly approved American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Important information regarding the elements of the act and the benefits it could have for your educational communities, libraries, and community centers is detailed below.
· The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) was signed into law on Tuesday, Feb 17th 2009.
· The total aid to education contained in the legislation, including tax credits, exceeds 100 billion.
· The first distribution of funds, involving both Title I and IDEA allocations, were scheduled to arrive in states by March 31, 2009.
· The success of ARRA depends on the commitment of educators, parents, students, and educations resources.
· 650 million dollars will be given from ARRA to assist in educational technology.
· Funds should be used to improve student achievement in connection with for educational reforms of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA):
o Make progress toward state standards and assessment
o Establish data systems to track progress
o Improve teacher effectiveness
o Provide intensive support and effective intervention for low performers
· Money to be distributed in fall of 2009
· Title I school improvement grants ($3 B)
· Educational Technology State Grants ($650M)
· 50% of “ Race- to-the-Top” competitive grants ($4.35B)
We should focus on Title I, Part A
· Provides finds to LEAs for schools with high concentrations of students who live in poverty to help improve teaching and learning to those students most at risk of failing to meet state academic achievement standards
· Strengthen and expand early childhood education by aligning programs with state early leaning standards and K-3 content standards
· Provide programs for secondary school students to use high-quality, online courseware as supplemental learning materials for meeting math and science requirements
· Use longitudinal data system to drive continuous improvement efforts
· Establish or expand learning opportunities
· Establish teacher training that builds teachers capacity to address academic achievement problems
· Provide professional development to teachers on the use of data to inform and improve instruction
For information regarding assistance in writing a grant proposal, please visit http://www.proposalwriter.com/grantsamples.html.
Perhaps the chart similar to the one on this website could be used: http://www.curriculumassociates.com/educator-resources/ARRA.asp?source=StimulusChart
We provide high speed data services to schools throughout North America. We even offer an e-rate discount for qualifying educational institutions. We are all in this together - so let us help! Give us a call, 330-785-2100 or click here to have one of our Sales Engineers contact you.
April 15th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Hi Ann (and the rest of the Education Team),
You and the team have obviously put a lot of thought into this outline, and the results show. We will be placing the 3 landing pages as navigational elements within the “2009 broadband stimulus” section of the site.
I edited your outline to remove the instructional commentary, and we will have it posted yet this evening. It’s good enough to move forward with, and we will revise as we go.
-Mike
April 15th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
As the professor guiding the FalcoLytics team, I am thrilled with the way that Mr. Kister and the other Skycasters personnel are working with the BGSU students on this applied project. There is no doubt that the students are learning a great deal — and I’m optimistic that they are developing campaigns that will benefit Skycasters. We’ll see!
April 16th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Mike,
Thank you for adding the Analytics code to the Skycaster website and adding the landing page. Everything looks great! However, we recognized an error in the outline we sent you that had been transferred to the website. Under the “Why does our facility need high speed broadband communication access?” section the last sentence is supposed to read “The ARRA provides your medical facility with the opportunity to use government funds to prepare for the future of healthcare.” Also, at the bottom of our page we would like to include an additional sentence that reads “For more information about Skycasters and the ARRA grant program contact a Skycasters sales representative today!”
Thanks again,
Aaron (Healthcare)
April 16th, 2009 at 9:57 am
Hi Aaron,
Please verify that the analytics code is working properly.
We will make those changes to the landing page today.
Thanks,
-Mike
April 21st, 2009 at 10:43 am
Hi Mike,
Your AdWords test account is actively running and we were able to set up a way for you to track visitors to your site at no cost. If you are interested in tracking visitors through Google Analytics and using this data to compare results of the Adwords campaign, please add the code below to your education page (Education page link: http://www.skycasters.com/broadband-solutions-for-stimulus-ARRA/bgsu-arra-education.html):
Thank you again for allowing our class to run an adwords campaign for your company.
Sincerely,
Ann Criqui
April 21st, 2009 at 10:50 am
Good Morning, Ann,
We have already added the analytics tracking code to the site for the Healthcare team, and we will be happy to do so for the Education team. We will actually add the tracking code across the entire site, giving you greater visibility into the activities of your visitors.
Mr. Stetka will take care of this this afternoon. He will email you when it is complete so that you can verify functionality.
Good luck with your testing, and I look forward to hearing your presentation on Thursday.
-Mike
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:24 pm
I’m headed to Bowling Green tonight, and I am looking forward to the student presentations tomorrow. Bring your ‘A Game’ and dress the part.
As an added bonus, I will be staying in BG tomorrow afternoon to participate in Marketing 301 ‘Speed Interviews.’ Students enrolled in the class have been asked to prepare an ‘elevator pitch’ to be delivered to executive interviewers (that’s me, I guess :-). I did this last year, and had the opportunity to meet some very impressive students. I also met a few that were ‘below the curve’, but that’s to be expected. Hopefully this experience will help improve the students’ confidence in themselves and their message, so they are able to deliver when it really counts.
-Mike
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:06 pm
From: Ann Vivian Criqui
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 12:06 PM
To: Mike Kister
Subject: BGSU: AdWords: Education Team (Keyword List)
Mike,
I’ve attached an .rtf file of the keywords we will be testing. We all appreciated your thorough feedback today.
Thank you,
Ann Criqui
BGSU Falcolytics
Education Team
April 23rd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
From: Megan E Bockbrader
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 4:36 PM
To: mike@skycasters.com
Cc: Lauren Taylor Schumacher; Stephanie M Tanner; Katherine S Burkholder; Gregory Alan Rich
Subject: BGSU Communities Team
Mike,
Attached is our PowerPoint from this morning’s presentation. Thank you again for your time.
Thank you,
Megan Bockbrader
Katy Burkholder
Lauren Schumacher
Stephanie Tanner
April 23rd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
From: Andrew J Baney
Sent: Thursday, April 23, 2009 7:56 PM
To: Mike Kister
Subject: BGSU- Healthcare Group
Hello Mr. Kister,
Our group has put together some various ad copies. We were hoping you could give us some feedback before we run them tomorrow. Thanks for your time and sorry this was sent so late.
Sincerely,
Aaron Neal
Andrew Baney
Carolyn Nesline
Lindsay Squier
April 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Hi Andrew (and team):
Google will not accept some of these (the ones in all CAPS!!!), but the rest should fly.
However, not all of them are really appropriate for Skycasters. You need to bear in mind that the vast majority of end users who need broadband will have a terrestrial alternative. In these cases, satellite is not the best solution for their needs.
Ads that have a broad appeal (to all hospitals) will produce a very high bounce rate. I believe that your ads (along with your keywords) need to specifically disclose the type of service/target that we are addressing.
I would recommend headlines like “Satellite Broadband”,”Rural Broadband”, etc. Maintain the body copy with EHR/EMR theme.
-Mike
April 27th, 2009 at 10:48 am
From: Mike Kister
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 10:48 AM
To: Andrew J Baney
Cc: Gordon Landefeld
Subject: RE: BGSU- Healthcare Group
Good Morning,
Please forward your PowerPoint presentation from last Thursday.
Thanks,
-Mike
April 27th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
From: Andrew J Baney
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 12:05 PM
To: Mike Kister
Subject: RE: BGSU- Healthcare Group
Sorry Mike,
Here is the PowerPoint!
-Andrew
April 27th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
From: Megan N Svat
Sent: Monday, April 27, 2009 1:43 PM
To: Mike Kister
Subject: RE: BGSU: AdWords: Education Team
Mr. Kister,
Attached is the Education Team power point. Sorry about the delay.
Megan
May 4th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Congratulations!
The BGSU Marketing Class, FalcoLytics, has released their final reports on their Skycasters AdWords campaigns.
One report actually contains findings we’ll implement in our own AdWords campaigns. Bravo!
See the attached presentations by sector:
Healthcare report & analysis
Education report & analysis
Communities report & analysis
- Mike
May 4th, 2009 at 10:22 pm
From: Megan E Bockbrader
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 10:22 PM
To: Mike Kister; Gregory Alan Rich
Subject: BGSU Communities
Appended below is the analysis paper from this morning’s presentation.
Thank you again for all of your time, Mike. It is greatly appreciated- this was an unbelievable learning experience.
Thank you,
Megan Bockbrader
ARRA- Communities
Skycasters
Megan Bockbrader
Katy Burkholder
Lauren Schumacher
Stephanie Tanner
Appendix
Introduction
Skycasters is a satellite internet company based in Akron Ohio. The owner and operator Mike Kister came to BGSU looking for students to help orchestrate several pay-per-click advertisements. Focusing on remote communities Skycasters is able to provide internet access to places that would never have been able to use cable internet. Mr. Kister approached Falcolytics about conducting pay-per-click ads to help generate business and business partners to aide in Skycasters application for ARRA funding.
Mr. Kister was interested in focusing on communities, education, and healthcare opportunities. Our group’s focus was communities. This includes remote locations and communities with low per-capita income levels. We thought Mr. Kister’s funds would be best spent focusing on acquiring business partners that would help Skycasters provide internet access to these communities. Skycasters is looking to attract companies from the following areas:
Our goal from the ad campaign was to gain partnerships that will help Skycasters take satellite internet to those communities off the grid. Companies that would make good partners would be communication companies, those who already provide terrestrial connections and networking among communities, technology players, and anyone with advanced technological skills that could help Skycasters break the geographic constraints.
The focus was put on partnerships because these alliances must be in line before any business transaction can take place. Also the ads are more likely to gain interest from businesses looking to get involved with ARRA than actually create business among communities. Finally, if these communities do not have internet access they are less likely to see the Adwords ad which would be a waste of advertising dollars.
Expanding internet service will provide many benefits for all those involved. By becoming partners, both companies will be able to combine their global reach, market strengths, and innovation thus being able to finally support the underserved areas with communication technology. Having a partner also provides a cost effective method for reaching this market. They will be able to extend traditional networks and get past the current constraints of terrestrial connections. Finally by creating these partnerships both companies will be able to stay ahead of the competition with the new innovations and superior customer service provided from reaching out to the underserved communities.
The project was broken into two main portions: a two-day test campaign and a real campaign that lasted four days.
The test campaign was conducted over a two-day span. Prior to the launch, our group decided to run four ads. They were:
Ad 1
Satellite Internet Access
Join Skycasters to Provide Internet
for Communities through ARRA.
http://www.Skycasters.com
Ad 2
Satellite Internet Access
Work with Skycasters to Apply
for ARRA Government Funding.
http://www.Skycasters.com
Ad 3
Skycasters Internet
Joint Business Ventures
Use ARRA to expand Your Business
http://www.Skycasters.com
Ad 4
Skycasters Internet
Looking for Partners to Deliver
Satellite Services through ARRA.
http://www.skycasters.com
We thought this would help us see which ads perform the best so that we would know which ad texts should be used during the real campaign. The ads were set to optimize so the best ad would be shown more, this indicated how the ads were performing. For the test campaign we targeted the whole United States of America with a budget of $50.00 a day, and a goal to have around 5000 impressions.
We selected ten keywords.
By focusing on detailed words and phrases, we thought we would be able to attract quality impressions and clicks rather then just obtaining many uninterested visitors. We also tried to make the keywords fit our landing page and ad text to help lower the cost of each keyword.
Test Campaign Analysis
We ran the test campaign for two days using the four different text ads. Since we set the campaign on optimizer we were able to determine which ad(s) were the best performing ones to give us better insight as to which ads to run for the actual campaign. According to the data presented below, we clearly saw that ad #1 and ad #2 were the best performing.
After seeing the results of the different text ads, we determined that using “Skycasters” in the heading of the ads was not as effective as using “Satellite Internet Access.” For the actual campaign we will choose to use ads #1 and #2 with the possibility of using the other two text ads with a different heading.
We kept all 10 keywords throughout the whole campaign and found that “Satellite Internet” by far as the most impressions and clicks, followed by “Satellite Internet Providers.” The following charts show the results of the keywords in the form of impressions and clicks.
The results of our keywords were much skewed and the reason for this is because our keywords are very specific and are not often search about on Google. So when we only have a few impressions and one click that is progress for us because that means that someone specifically searched for our keyword and clicked on our ad because they understand what the ad is trying to say. As we stated earlier, we want to strive for quality people clicking on our ads, so the more specific our keywords are and the clicks associated with those keywords, means that we have a higher chance of getting quality people clicking on the ads.
Our test campaign also resulted in our group spending $71.70 of the $100 budget, meaning that we have $28.30 to add to the actual campaign. Most of our impressions and click came from the keyword “Satellite Internet” but the campaign did result in 7799 impressions with 47 clicks; a click through rate of .60%.
Campaign Strategy and Analysis
Before running our four-day campaign we thoroughly discussed our strategy. We decided that it was more important to have a very high quality campaign with effective keywords and texts than having a large quantity of impressions and clicks.
With a budget of $55 a day during the four-day campaign, the initial cost per click (CPC) bid for each of the keywords was set to $2.51. After watching the campaign for a day we increased the bid to $3.73 to increase our page position to make sure that the ads were being shown on the first page. We then increased the CPC bid for the keyword “Satellite Internet Providers” to $6.51 because its position was very low.
Listed below are the 3 text ads that were used in the campaign:
Ad Text #1: Satellite Internet Access
Join Skycasters to Provide Internet
For Communities through ARRA.
http://www.Skycasters.com
Ad Text #2: Satellite Internet Access
Work with Skycasters to Provide
For Government ARRA Funding.
http://www.Skycasters.com
Ad Text #3: Satellite Internet Access
Looking for Partners to Deliver
Services through ARRA.
http://www.Skycasters.com
After considering the results from the two-day test campaign we decided to use the two most successful ad texts for the campaign and the body text from one of the ads, with a new heading. The original heading had “Skycasters” in it, which we determined was not beneficial for the campaign since most people are not familiar with Skycasters and ultimately would not know what they are clicking on then. The third ad text was not developed into the campaign until Tuesday, April 28, 2009, which was nearly two days into the campaign.
The following are the ten keywords that were used in the campaign. These are very specific and narrow keywords. Our strategy was that we wanted to have very defined keywords because we did not want to spend money on clicks from people who are not interested in Skycasters or their services. By defining the keywords we were able to attract people who were most likely interested in Skycasters or the concept of becoming a partner. Our goal was that we would not necessarily attract a large amount of impressions and clicks for each of the key words, but the people who did click the keywords were interested and learned something about Skycasters while also hopefully becoming a potential customer.
The only keyword listed above that is a broad term is “satellite internet”. Our intentions of using this keyword were that if our text ad was very specific and well defined we would not have problems with unwanted visitors. “Satellite Internet” was the most costly keyword and had the most number of impressions and clicks.
Throughout the campaign we made many small changes in order to maximize our results. The first change was to put the campaign on a schedule; we set it to run from 6am to 10pm because that is when professionals would most likely be at work (with a couple hours before and after to allow for flexibility). The percentage listed on the campaign settings is incorrect however because we left the settings to run all day on the weekends because the campaign was only running Monday through Thursday.
On the third day of the campaign we had only spent about $125 so since there was extra money we made some changes to the campaign. First the max CPC bid was changed from $2.51 to $3.73 for all the keywords. Additionally the max CPC bid for the keyword “satellite internet providers” was manually changed to $6.51 in order to gain first page status. We felt this was an important keyword because potential partners may just search for internet providers if they are thinking of partnering with someone.
A content network was also added to the campaign. This was added to potentially grab partners’ attention if they were not necessarily searching on Google. Five sites were added as content networks:
These sites were chosen because when technology and business technology were searched these appeared on the first page. The sites also seem to contribute more business technology news as opposed to consumer technology and trends. This content network didn’t provide us with any useful results however it didn’t cost us anything either. There was only one impression and no clicks. This could be for a number of reasons such as these sites aren’t actually viewed very often, or the ads weren’t actually being shown on the pages.
The following charts show the final number of impressions and clicks for each of the ad texts and individual keywords in our campaign.
The four-day campaign generated 9,376 impressions and 74 clicks. The total cost was $191.04. Using the Google Analytics feature we were able to determine that the average time spent by visitors on the Skycasters webpage was two minutes and thirteen seconds, which is a fairly long time for visitors to stay on the site. This shows that people were interested in the site and were not just clicking on the site and then leaving quickly. Google Analytics was able to provide data that told us that there was a bounce rate of 48.21%, which is also very good. A complete report from Google Analytics is provided in the appendix.
The final results for the campaign appear as if they could be promising. There were three keywords with a 100% click through rate, they were:
If people were searching this specific of a phrase we feel like they would have to be potential partners because customers would not be typing this in to search. The overall click through rate was .79%, and a complete list of keyword analysis can be found in the appendix.
Our average ad position was low, but this is in part due to “satellite internet provider” being so expensive. We did not raise our bid till after a couple days so we had very low position with that keyword. Another problem we faced was raising the quality score for American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. Our ad text only said the acronym ARRA and Google did not recognize this as the same thing.
Conclusion and Recommendations
After evaluating the results of the four-day campaign combined with the two-day test we have several recommendations for Skycasters if they are to continue a campaign in the future. The first suggestion would be to consider not using “Satellite Internet” as a key word. The keyword cost nearly $170 of the campaign. It is likely that many of the people who clicked were not interested in becoming a partner of Skycasters, but we do not have any hard data to confirm that. Skycasters needs to weigh the costs and the benefits of using it as a keyword and if they are able to determine any type of conversions. We do suggest that all of the other keywords be used in the future as we feel that they are very specific and can help to find the right people that Skycasters is looking for.
It is also suggested that the #1 and #2 text ads are used. Both of these ads performed very well during the two-day test and the four-day campaign. These two ads very specifically address what the company is looking for. The #3 ad text did not perform well in the two-day test and the four-day campaign even when the heading was changed. It would be suggested that the ad text #3 not be used.
Finally, it is suggested that the Skycasters name not be used in the heading of any ad texts. During our test campaign we found that texts that contained “Skycasters” did not perform well because people are not familiar with Skycasters. The “Skycasters” name is not necessarily known to the general public. The heading needs to contain something to catch the searchers eye, but still relevant to what we are looking for.
May 7th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
From: Olivia L Szilagyi
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 11:00 AM
To: Mike Kister
Subject: RE: BGSU: AdWords: Education Team
Dear Mike,
Attached is a copy of the power point and paper. Thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to work with you.
Best of luck!
Sincerely,
The Education Team
Post-Campaign Strategy
Skycasters, LLC.
Ann Criqui, Todd Chiarelott, Megan Svat, Olivia Szilagyi
Executive Summary
After working closely with a local business in Bowling Green, Ohio, Aardvark Screen Printing and Embroidery, we were able to gain the knowledge and expertise needed to successfully conduct an online advertising campaign. Working with Skycasters, LLC. allowed us to further our experience with the online market, as well as challenge ourselves in the world of analytics. As the education team we wanted to be able to increase awareness in schools and libraries regarding the E-Rate Program. After doing a great deal of research concerning the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), broadband stimulus package, and the No Child Left Behind Act, we were able to create an ad group and keywords that we thought would attract the most visitors to Skycasters’ website.
Our online advertising campaign for Skycasters began with an initial two day test period, and then proceeded to a four day campaign. Each group received $100 for the two day test period and during this time period our main goal was to test what geographic regions to target and a time frame for when to run the campaign. After presenting our results to Mike Kister, each group was distributed money. Being that we were given $300 towards our four day campaign, we made the necessary changes so we could produce the expected results. Our final cost for the four day campaign and two day test period was $393.55. We ended with 47,938 impressions, 87 clicks, a CTR of 0.18%, and average CPC of $4.52.
Industry Component
The education campaign was highly structured based on keyword choices and the daily monitoring of our Adwords account. We believed that we refined these words to the best of our ability during the four day time period, as well as greatly improved our efforts on other characteristics of the Adwords campaign. We were able to focus on many different characteristics of our campaign including keywords, geotargeting, analytics, number of clicks, and time of day.
I. Campaign Goals:
The overall goal of our campaign was to increase awareness of Skycasters to the education sector of Google, as well as inform schools of the benefits of ARRA and the broadband stimulus package, along with Skycasters internet, to receive free broadband for their school or library. The metrics that we set included 10,000 impressions and 150 clicks over the four day period. Therefore, we hoped to receive a 1.5% click through rate and a CPC of $1.50. We wanted to approach these goals by setting relevant, high quality key words in order to drive down our CPC. We believed that we had found a good ad text to work with that allowed many of our most important keywords to show up on the first search page. We ran our campaign over a four day period beginning on Friday, then resumed on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. During this period we wanted to equally divide our budget, since we were not sure as to what specific time of day our target market would be searching more, or less. We decided to use the adgroup directed toward schools (grades K-8) with an ad text of:
Stimulate Your Education
Skycasters brings broadband to you
Access satellite internet today!
http://www.Skycasters.com/broadband
We monitored the account as closely as possible each day. Our goal within the first two days was to split the money between the time period of 8a.m.-3p.m. and 3p.m.-10p.m., to see if we were attracting attention at both times. However, we had a tendency of spending a great deal of our money during the morning hours, so not much was left to spend after 3p.m. The remaining two days of our campaign we worked out some of these problems and were able to accurately distribute our money and record the action during the 3p.m.-10p.m. time period. We continued to formulate our initial plan of spending the same amount of money each day; although, we did not spend the entire budget on Friday and had money to carry over to the remaining days. We checked the account every day, working to reduce the CPC by adding more relevant keywords.
II. Evolution of Your Campaign Strategy:
We made a great deal of changes throughout our campaign. We worked hard on improving the CTR and the CPC every day by tweaking and rearranging the keywords to develop more relevant words. We worked with the max CPC to find a number that would allow our keywords to show up without depleting our budget. By using applications available for our access on the Ad Words website we were able to pin point key words that were specific with our needs, and that would be available on the search pages with a CPC of $5. When monitoring the time differences we worked on distributing our money throughout the day by pausing the campaign whenever the budget was increasing too quickly. We monitored the geographics to conclude which states were most interested in the broadband stimulus plan. Much of this information was hard for us to process at the time because of the short time span we were given, but much of this information would be helpful to Skycasters if they wished to continue this Ad Words account. The changes we made affected our campaign by giving us more control over the money we were spending, when we were spending it, and the quality of success our budget provided.
III. Key Results:
Ultimately, the outcome of our campaign was able to produce successful results. We tried not to focus as much on the CTR, but the fact that any one of these clicks, if a quality click, could lead to a large sum of money for the company. It is not about how many clicks you receive, but which ones were most relevant to the topic and the product being sold. Our total Impressions were 47,338 with 87 clicks. This gave us a CTR of 0.18% and an average CPC of $4.52. Our total money spent over the four day campaign was $393.55, and our average position was 3.17. Some of our most popular keywords included “education,” satellite internet, school grants, and stimulus plan.
The geotargeting results for the campaign include a number of states that have been interested in the adgroup. These include Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas and Illinois. For our campaign we tried to distinguish between different times of day and if more people were searching for our product during the school day (8-3) or during after school hours (3-10). This was difficult for us to accomplish at first because we had not worked out all of the problems with the keywords and the CPC was high so we had spent our money before we were able to look at the after school hours. On the last day we split our money up equally between the two time periods and saw that we received more clicks during the school day (10 clicks), but the amount of clicks during after school hours was not much less (7 clicks). We also wanted to compare the days to see if the beginning of the week or the end of the week was most successful. The results showed that Friday was the least successful day with only 6 clicks, and Tuesday was the most successful day with 22 clicks. All days at the beginning of the week had clicks in double digits. The average time spent on the site was 55 seconds, the number of pages people viewed on average was 1.60 pages, and the bounce back rate was 88.73%.
Some of the successful keywords included education (45 clicks), stimulus plan (5 clicks), and satellite internet and school grants with 2 clicks each. We believe the bounce back rate is so high because our keywords, such as education, were so broad that people did not really want to go to the site. We took steps to help improve these broad keywords by adding negative keywords, as well as individually specializing the keywords by placing parenthesis around them.
Throughout this campaign we have worked hard to improve all of the characteristics of the ad group. We believe that if this campaign were to continue we would be able to implement any changes necessary to make it successful and generate a group of quality clicks.
IV. Analytics:
Google AdWords revealed a metric of 61 clicks. Eighteen of these clicks were not registered by Google Analytics, which reported a total of 43 visits. The reason for this apparent error can be explained by the common misinterpretation of the terms “clicks” and “visits”. Google AdWords tracks “clicks,” while Google Analytics tracks “visits.” If a user clicks an ad two times within a thirty-minute period of time without closing their browser, their actions will be interpreted as one visit in Google Analytics and two clicks in Google AdWords. Because this section of the report is based on Analytics, all results discussed here forth will be relative to the 43 visits. Our results are also based on users clicking the ad from the Education campaign and landing on the ARRA – Education page (http://www.skycasters.com/broadband-solutions-for-stimulus-ARRA/bgsu-arra-education.html).
The Analytics Campaign Site Usage summary concluded figures of 55 seconds for the average time spent on the site, with 1.63 pages viewed per visit, and 100 percent of those visits derived from new users. However, the bounce rate was 88.37%. This means that the 11.63% of users who remained on the site have skewed results. When the data is further analyzed, one can conclude that 5 visitors had a bounce rate of zero percent and remained on the site, and of those visitors their range of time spent on the site was 14 seconds to 30 minutes and 15 seconds, with a revealed average time spent on the site of 7 minutes and 54 seconds. The pages per visit must also be reinterpreted under these same principles. The 5 visitors viewed 3 to 14 pages, with an average of 6.2 pages viewed per visit.
Results confirm that the Education campaign sent 43 visits via 39 cities. The five visitors with a bounce rate of zero were from the cities of Bowling Green, Ohio; Cabot, Arkansas; Dayton, Ohio; Lancaster, Kentucky; and Minot, North Dakota. The other 35 cities reported a bounce rate of 100 percent and can be found in Appendix A.
In conclusion, the overall results were minute in quantity and therefore relatively insignificant when analyzed at a small level. However, if the data is considered as a highly selective focus group of the large scope of possible consumers, the results can be quite significant. There is a small percentage of visitors, 11.63 percent, who remained on the site and this demonstrates a potential need that was met. Individuals were searching for something, and were able to find what they were looking for through the CPC ad on Google. Those who clicked on the Education campaign ad and visited the site expressed an interest in the material with which they were presented. If Skycasters has grabbed the interest of an individual in their selective target market, and that individual is a potential client, then the Analytics results indicated five potential clients from 4 states. Skycasters could take the results presented in this analysis and focus their campaigns in the areas that have visitors with a bounce rate of zero percent. If their efforts were focused in these areas, and the company were to make itself more pronounced, through CPC campaigns and multimedia advertising, the clients who visited the site may become more familiar with the company and be more inclined to make a purchase.
Learning Component
I. Learning Objectives and Outcomes:
Through the duration of our ad campaign, our team not only hoped to gain insight on the advantages of online marketing, but we wanted to make an impact on the business success of Skycasters, LLC. As marketing majors, we have previously learned various aspects of advertising, ranging from print to broadcast. Being given the opportunity to work with a real client gave us the motivation needed to successfully create an online campaign, and differentiate ourselves amongst our competition. In order to meet the needs of Skycasters, we wanted to learn more about their everyday business operations so we could have an overall impact in helping them better serve the needs of those interested in the E-Rate Program.
Our team not only met our primary learning goals, but we were able to exceed expectations. Understanding the basics of online marketing was a fundamental learning aspect, but we continued to go beyond this and use Google Analytics to strengthen our campaign, as well as create multiple keywords that we thought would be most successful. This was an experience that we wanted to benefit from, as well as increase awareness of Skycasters and the assistance they can provide to schools and libraries. Taking into consideration that many people obtain information through internet access, we realized that our increased knowledge of online marketing would give us the experience we need to succeed in any marketing profession.
I. Group Dynamics:
Establishing keywords was something we reported amongst our group on a daily basis so that we could select the ones that were most relevant to our ad group and that would generate the greatest number of clicks. Being that we had received the greatest amount of money to use towards our ad campaign, we wanted to spend our budget wisely by targeting specific regions of the country, and eliminating the keywords that were costly, and irrelevant. Discussing a campaign strategy and creating reports daily, allowed us to closely monitor our campaign over the four day period.
II. Client Dynamics:
In order to create a campaign that would benefit Skycasters, we initially decided to use the original landing page where customers could access information regarding the E-Rate program. We did make minor changes, such as placing ARRA in the left-hand navigation. Our client approved this and said it greatly improved the SEO against that term. Ultimately, the three landing pages were placed as navigational elements within the “2009 Broadband Stimulus” section of the site. We hope that the additional information provided on the landing page will allow visitors to navigate the website more efficiently.
III. Future Recommendations:
After closely analyzing our campaign for Skycasters, we decided on several changes we would make, such as placing our CPC at a cost between $6 and $7. Also, we would focus on our best performing keywords and eliminate education because of how broad of a keyword it was. It would also be more desirable to test for a few more weeks. Being that our results showed less clicks on Friday and a larger amount on Monday-Wednesday, we would divide money spent to distribute more money on Monday-Wednesday. Our campaign was more successful during the hours from 8a.m.-3p.m. because this is when we received the most clicks.
When referring back to our results on Google analytics, the geographic locations we would focus on would be Ohio, Arkansas, Kentucky, and North Dakota because in these locations we had five people that did not bounce. These people could be potential customers; therefore we would direct our attention in these areas through increased advertising. Using the insights for search tool would allow us to focus on cities instead of states that are interested in specific keywords. Lastly, watching the news would help us better the campaign because if information is brought up relevant to our campaign then this may allow us to buy keywords for cheaper. Including the best performing keywords in our ad copy would allow us to compare the results. A recommended change we would make to our ad copy would be to change the third line to “Satellite internet through grants.”
Keyword List
“stimulus package”
“stimulus bill”
“stimulus plan”
“american recovery and reinvestment act”
“american recovery and reinvestment”
“2009 arra”
“arra 2009″
“economic stimulus package”
“state equalization fund”
“educational technology”
“education stimulus”
“education stimulus bailout”
“education stimulus money”
“2009 stimulus plan”
“2009 stimulus bill”
“2009 stimulus package”
“stimulus internet”
“education technology stimulus”
“stimulus bill”
“satellite backup”
“broadband stimulus package”
“broadband stimulus plan”
“satellite internet backup”
“satellite back-up”
“satellite internet back-up”
“k-12 education stimulus”
“stimulus bill for education”
“education economic stimulus”
“satellite stimulus”
“remote satellite internet”
“remote broadband access”
“urban broadband”
“remote education”
“arra education”
“dish satellite internet”
“portable satellite internet”
“internet for education”
“quality satellite internet”
“education internet options”
“education internet back-up”
“education internet backup”
“education internet plan”
“education internet plans”
“educational internet”
“quality internet coverage”
“broadband satellite internet access”
“broadband satellite internet access for schools”
“landline backup”
“school internet backup”
“education internet connectivity”
“satellite internet connectivity”
“satellite broadband internet”
“education broadband”
“skycasters education”
“skycasters broadband”
“skycasters stimulus plan”
“skycasters stimulus”
“satelite backup”
“satalite backup”
“sattellite backup”
“sattelite backup”
“satelite internet backup”
“satalite internet backup”
“sattellite internet backup”
“sattelite internet backup”
“satelite back-up”
“satalite back-up”
“sattellite back-up”
“sattelite back-up”
“satelite internet back-up”
“satalite internet back-up”
“sattellite internet back-up”
“sattelite internet back-up”
“satelite stimulus”
“satalite stimulus”
“sattellite stimulus”
“sattelite stimulus”
May 8th, 2009 at 9:05 am
From: Andrew J Baney
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 2:46 PM
To: Mike Kister; Gregory Alan Rich
Subject: RE: BGSU Healthcare Team Analysis
We have appended the paper below. Thanks for all your help this semester!!!
Healthcare Team
Skycasters Post-Campaign Summary
Aaron Neal, Andrew Baney, Carolyn Nesline, Lindsay Squier
(Healthcare)
Skycasters Post-Campaign Summary
Campaign Overview
Our overall goal for our campaign was to drive traffic to the Skycasters website ultimately increasing the company’s customer base. We specifically targeted potential clients in the healthcare industry that qualify for federal grant money to either update or backup their current internet service. Before beginning our campaign, we set several performance goals that we hoped would help us achieve this goal. These goals were to receive 500 clicks with a click-through-rate (CTR) of 5 percent. We constructed a total of 10 ad variations that included campaign relevant headings such as ARRA Healthcare Grants, Broadband Connectivity, and Satellite Broadband. These ad copies would be tested on the first day of our campaign to determine the which ones we should use for the remaining three days. The keywords that we chose for the campaign we believed were also highly relevant to our target audience. These included healthcare terms such as “electronic medical records” (“emr”), “electronic health records” (“ehr”), and keywords related to the grants available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).
Campaign Results
Following the completion of our first day Ad Copy test, we paused 4 of our 10 ad copies. These were the poorest performing ads because they were not relevant to the content of our landing page, which resulted in a higher overall cost per click (CPC). On day two of our campaign we adjusted the maximum CPC of individual keywords to ensure that our ads appear on the first page of each relevant Google search. We also turned off the content network to try to reduce unwanted clicks that had caused our bounce rate to be 80% on the second day. The keyword “emr” was performing poorly the first two days and we decided it was not worth the $9 minimum CPC so we paused it. On the third day of our campaign our bounce rate was reduced to 44.44%. We believe that this reduction was directly related to turning off the content network. To optimize our campaign after the third day, we paused an underperforming ad copy that had bounce rate of 83.33%, and also adjusted our max. CPC to meet first page estimates. On the fourth day of our campaign we received the most impressions and also the most clicks. Our click through rate increased to .21% however our bounce rate did increase to 56.25%.
The overall campaign totals for our campaign included 29,128 impressions and 56 clicks resulting in a click through rate of .19%. We spent a total of $244.49 and our final bounce rate was 64.29%.
Future Recommendations
Due to the short duration of time our Adwords campaign for Skycasters was performed, we realize that simply do not have enough data to see any significant trends in our ad copies, keywords, or landing page. However, we feel that for the sake of this project we will make these recommendations based on what little data we have. We will make recommendations on the three main variables in an ad campaign, landing page, keywords, and ad copy.
Even though we only used one landing page, we feel that our data supports Skycasters altering their landing page in an effort to increase its relevancy to our target market, our keywords, and our ad copies. Our keywords and ad copies generally had a CPC of over $4. We realize that on a larger scale campaign a CPC that high could cut into Skycasters budget in a very significant way. That is why we need to focus on increasing Landing Page relevancy to bring the CPC down. The one obvious flaw in the landing page that our team created is that it fails to mention the terms EMRs and EHRs. These terms are in almost all of our ad copies and they are important keywords in our campaign as well. In fact the CPC rose so high for EMRs during our campaign that we reluctantly paused the keyword. Our second suggestion for the landing page is to add a conversion metric on the Contact Information and the Service Plans links on our page. We feel this will help your company measure the success of the landing page more effectively in the future. Currently, the landing page is judged mostly on its bounce rate and time on page, the problem with this is we cannot tell if our customers are not bouncing because they are interested in contacting Skycasters or if they are not bouncing because the landing page was not relevant to what they are searching for so they are trying to find a page on the Skycasters website that does contain the information they seek. A conversion metric will clear up this confusion.
During our testing, we did have one relatively successful ad copy that outperformed the others. The ARRA Healthcare Grants ad copy had a relatively low bounce rate, a strong time on page, and a CTR that was above our campaign average. For these reasons we recommend that Skycasters continue the use of this ad and also test different variations of this ad. We recognize that the data on this ad does have room for improvement, which is why believe Skycasters should make several slight variations to the ad title and body content and test those variations to determine if there is a better combination available.
Overall, our team was fairly disappointed with our keywords. However, after some evaluation, we feel that we can learn from our mistakes and make general recommendations as to how to build successful keywords in the future. One way to create more finely targeted keywords is to use the exact match function. Additionally, creating high targeted and extremely specific phrasing will further increase the effectiveness of the keywords and ultimately improve their quality score. A high quality score is imperative to keeping your CPC down which in the long run will save Skycasters a great deal of money.