Executive Summary | Evibe is a start-up, conceived in July (2014), acting as an online

marketplace/aggregator to find, book & arrange birthday parties in Bangalore city of India. Prior

to our online marketing campaign, Evibe hadn’t spent time in marketing as Founders were busy

in building the business. Our campaign was the first structured marketing campaign for

Evibe. The objective was to increase the awareness & the number of bookings for Evibe. We ran

the campaign for 17 days and spend $250.61. There were 3 campaigns (each dedicated to a

particular category of service) running 8 Ad groups where each Adgroup was dedicated to

promote a specific service offered. Our strategy was to maximize the CTR & conversion by making

Ad relevant to the offering of Evibe. At the same time we improved keywords daily so higher

quality score & to make sure we consistently ranked in top 2 position by spending less.

Techniques like landing page optimisation, Call-to-action, Ad extension, dynamic keyword

insertion, flexi-bidding, Bid simulator, Keyword planner, Google analytics, Optmyzr were

used to optimise the performance of the campaign. Before running the campaign we had an

objective of generating ROAS=516%. To our surprise, we exceeded our expectation. We were

able to generate 7 leads via website form-filling & 146 through Call-Ad extension. Out of this

153 leads, finally 40 got converted (Source: Evibe) resulting into actual ROAS of 755%. We

also exceeded other KPIs like

Impression, CTR & Average CPC. We

did a conservative estimate for

impressions (as there was no past data

available) to be around 7000. But we

exceeded that number in the first week

itself. By the end of campaign we had 16313 impressions & 620 clicks which gave us the CTR of

3.8% compared to our initial target CTR of 7.14% which was high by the industry standard and

was very ambitious. Our Impression share for most of the days was above 50%.Our search exact

match was above 80%, avg position 1.7, account quality score 7.5 (Source: Optmyzr).

Conclusion & recommendation: Our campaign met the desired objective of creating more than

500 clicks & 7000 impressions. Conversions were less but customers spent more on the category

Party venues which had high avg ticket value thereby increasing ROAS. Now paid search

contribute 11.8% of the total traffic. Our recommendation to the Client is to continue investing in

Google Ad words as this increased the size of the pie.

Pre-campaign Post-Campaign

CTR 7.14% 3.8%

Average CPC $0.5 $0.4

Clicks 500 620

Impressions 7000 16313

Conversions 80 40

Avg Ticket Spend $ 162 $ 330

ROAS 516% 755%

CPC % of total traffic 0 11.8%

Industry Component | India is currently witnessing an E-commerce boom. Indian consumer has

more discretionary spending and has accepted the digital sales channel for its convenience, greater

discovery & long-tail assortment. Event management industry is one such space being transformed

by technology & is estimated to be at $830 million and YoY growth 14%. Our client Evibe

Technologies Ltd is one such startup which operates in the birthday planning & organizing

space and has built a marketplace of birthday party organizers with related services.

Target group is 24-40 years old technocrats in Bangalore who want to organize the birthdays for

their kids. The Founders’ did an excellent job at SEO and now when anybody searches for birthday

party in Bangalore in Google, our client’s website is the first result and hence all the enquiries are

organic.

Since the entry barrier is low in this industry & the customers in this target group are tech

savvy, players like Partymanao.com, headrush.in launched an aggressive Adwords campaign

leading to dip in enquiries received. In order to stay ahead of

competition and recapture the market share, it became

necessary that our client connects with the potential customer

and communicates the value proposition well to differentiate

itself well. Therefore in the Google Adwords, the mandate of

our campaign was twofold-

1. Create awareness of Evibe’s services for birthday party

planning and

2. Generate leads from prospects

Table 1 Adwords pre-campaign goals for key metric & the actual results achieved.

Network Impressions

Result Target

Clicks

Result Target

CTR

Result Target

CPC

Result Target

Leads

Result Target

ROAS

Result Target

Search 16313 7000 620 500 3.8% 7.14% $0.40 $0.50 153 80 755% 516%

Our campaign was launched on 5th May. We were able to track lead generation by no. of enquiry

form filled on website & the call-extension clicked on mobile. Since Google Forwarding no. is

not available in India, calls made to client by prospects who started from Adwords served on

Desktop cannot be tracked, some of sales cannot be attributed because of this ROPO effect. We

made full use of Ad-extensions like site-links, call-Extensions & call-out extensions. We kept

our campaign restricted to search network & partners only because the kind of services our client

16,313 Impressions

620 Clicks

153 Leads

40 Conversions

offer does not fall under the category of “Impulse Buy” but it is a “Planned Buy” hence a

customer actively looks for this service when he needs it. We dropped the idea of remarketing

because the frequency of using birthday party services by a customer is low, only once/twice

a year. The remarketing budget was reallocated to the campaigns which were attracting maximum

customer. We also excluded the IP address of our college and the client’s office IP in Google

Adwords to prevent serving of any ads. We Focus on clicks, manual maximum CPC bidding on

all types of devices.

Evolution of Campaign Evolution: Phase 1: May 5 – May 9

New Kid on the block &

competition: We expanded a

lot of effort in integrating

Google Analytics with our

Adwords campaign as

needed the event tracking for

counting leads and bounce

rate per keyword. Initially

we let our campaings run so

as to gather significant no.

of impressions but then we

lost a lot of impression

market share & avg CPC

went above $.50 which was

the danger zone for us. After

hooking up with Google

Analytics we analyzed bounce rate per keywords and avg session duration.

We brainstormed on how to regain a market share of at least 40%. Meanwhile we decided to

pause one of our Adgroup in the Birthday Packages campaign as some of the keywords were

overlapping with the other Adgroup and suffered from low impressions because of long-tail

keywords which had low search volume.

We used the landing pages associated with these Adgroups in our six sitelinks ad-extension. We

had garnered 68 clicks, 2584 impressions with avg CPC of $.47.

Account

In-Party Services Party Venues

Birthday Packages

2 Adgroups

5 Ads

108 Keywords

2 Adgroups

7 Ads

219 Keywords

3 Adgroups

8 Ads

60 Keywords

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0

50

100

1 2 3 4 5

Avg

CP

C (

$)

Imp

r M

arke

t Sh

are

Day: May 5 - May 9

Impr Share vs Avg CPC

Impr Share

Avg CPC

Table 2: Campaign wise break up of phase 1 result

Phase 2: May 10- May 15 Optimization is the Mantra: Some of our actions bore fruit and we

regained our lost market share. Earlier we were using Flexible Bid strategy but now we

moved to manual bid strategy. We scheduled all our campaigns to run from 9:00 AM to 9:00

PM IST so as to get eyeballs of most working class people. We analyzed the trade-off between

the bounce rate, CTR & avg CPC at keyword level and paused many of the keywords. We

removed some of our Adgroups from Google Search Partner networks as they were not getting

any clicks event after sufficient impressions.

We paused 2 Adgroups in the In-Party services campaign as they were not getting any clicks. We

created Dynamic Keyword

Insertion Ads and rotated the Ads

by optimizing for clicks. Our

quality score improved & avg.

CPC came down. In the previous

phase we were losing Impr Share

because of budget constraints [Lost

IS (budget)], we decided to accept Google recommendation of increasing our budget to capture

more impressions & clicks.

Phase 3: May 16- May 21 Decrease the bounce rate we must: We were really concerned about

the high bounce rates because this will lead to lower leads generations & eventually lower

conversions & ROI. We then discovered In-Page analytics feature of Google Analytics. This

was wonderful because instead of A/B testing the landing pages, we could see which of the

vendor had high clicks in each category, had high visual appeal & load times as the landing

Campaign Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. Pos Leads Bounce Rate

Birthday Packages 162 4725 3.43% $0.40 $64.23 1.8 44 53.55%

Party Venue 119 3013 3.95% $0.45 $53.15 1.5 13 62.62%

In Party Services 49 1325 3.70% $0.28 $13.79 2.5 35 52.08%

Total 330 9,063 3.64% $0.40 $131.17 1.6 95 56.45%

Campaign Clicks Impressions CTR

Avg.

CPC Cost

Avg.

Pos

In Party Services 23 639 3.60% $0.31 $7.19 2.2

Party Venue 28 1204 2.33% $0.45 $12.69 1.8

Birthday Packages 17 741 2.29% $0.70 $11.97 1.5

Total 68 2,584 2.63% $0.47 $31.85 1.8

0.3

0.35

0.4

0.45

0

50

100

16 17 18 19 20 21A

vg C

PC

($

)

Imp

r M

arke

t Sh

are

Day: May 10 - May 15

Impr Market Share vs Avg CPC

Impr Share

Avg CPC

pages. We added Dynamic Ad

Targets in this phase, disabled

a lot more keywords which had

accumulated a high bounce

rate. The hard work bore fruit

and we were able to bring

down bounce rate of two

campaigns.

Campaign Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg Pos Leads Bounce Rate

Birthday Packages 74 1351 5.48% $0.41 $30.29 1.5 9 42.67%

Party Venue 120 2643 4.54% $0.40 $48.55 1.3 39 63.41%

In Party Services 28 672 4.17% $0.31 $8.75 2.3 3 41.38%

Total 82 1664 4.93% $0.39 $87.59 1.5 54* 53.74%

Table 3 : Phase III May 16-May21

Key results & conclusion although we planned to run the campaign for 3 weeks our budget got

over for us in 17 days. We overshot some of our set targets in terms of CTR and ROAS which

was good. We succeeded to an extent in decreasing the bounce rate. Although we expected

overall CTR 7.14% (which was very high & optimistic) but we got a decent CTR of 3.8%. We

targeted average CPC to be less than $0.5 and we were successfully able to bring it down to $0.4.

Table 4: Overall Campaign

The client was able to convert 40 out of the 153 leads acquired from the Adwords CPC channel.

The avg ticket size of the client is around $330 leading to a ROMI of 755% and ROI of 655%.

Campaign Clicks Impressions CTR Avg. CPC Cost Avg. Pos Bounce rate Leads Cost per Lead

Birthday Packages 259 6715 3.86% $0.39 $101.71 1.8 50% 73 $ 1.39

Party Venue 267 6860 3.89% $0.43 $114.39 1.5 63% 57 $ 2.01

In Party Services 94 2738 3.43% $0.37 $34.51 2.2 48% 17 $ 2.16

Total 620 16313 3.80% $0.40 $250.61 1.7 55% 153* $ 1.64

0

0.5

0

2000

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

CTR

Imp

ress

ion

s

Days

Impressions vs CTR

Impr

CTR

0.3

0.35

0.4

0.45

0

50

100

16 17 18 19 20 21

Avg

CP

C (

$)

Imp

r M

arke

t Sh

are

Day: May 16 - May 21

Impr Market Share vs Avg CPC

Impr Share

Avg CPC

Table 5 SEO ( 17 days of April) Adwords (17 days of May)

Impressions 11874 16313

CTR 11.84% 3.80%

Leads 120 153

Leads/Clicks Ratio 9% 25%

Investment Opportunity Cost of Founder’s Skill $250.67

Cost Per Lead - $ 1.64

Avg Ticket Size $330 $330

Gross Value of Services

Sold

$ 9,900 $ 12,622.50

Margin (@15%) $ 1,485.00 $ 1,893.38

ROMI/ROAS - 755%

ROI - 655%

Return per Leads $ 12.38 $ 12.38

In the graph below, date from Google Analytics is retrieved and by comparing the website traffic

between Apr 5-

Apr 21 (No

Adwords) vs May

5 – May 21

(Adwords) the

overall website sessions increased by 41.67%. Most of it can attributed to seasonality of

searches as we saw from Keyword Planner that traffic peaks from Apr till July but direct traffic

too increased by 21.72% part of which can be attributed to Adwords impressions.

Future Recommendations

1. Landing page and website content is very important for the final conversion: With the Ad

words one can achieve CTR and impressions but final conversion depends a lot on the website

experience and ease of navigation. Use In-Page analytics and A/B testing to find out which

landing pages generate greater session duration, low bounce rates and higher conversions.

2. Introduce online payment gateway : customers feel much more secure paying via verified

payment gateways rather than depositing money in the bank a/c it becomes easier to track ROI

3. Focus on Mobile: Around 41% of the total Adwords traffic was from Mobile devices. Bounce

rates are high on mobile too but avg CPC and Ad Position is better compared to Desktop. We

made same Ads for mobile as well Desktop, but we suggest that the client make two different

ads because there is substantial avg CPC difference. ($ 0.42 on Desktop vs $ 0.37 on Mobiles).

4. Use Ad extension to have a good call-to-action: We experimented with many different ads.

Used questions in Ad headings, capitalisations etc. We were surprised to see that the

0

500

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Dai

ly S

ess

ion

s

Days: May 5 - May 21/ Apr 5 - Apr 21

Website Traffic: Before & After

May Sessions

Apr Sessions

Dynamic Keyword Insertion Ad performing really well. We tried to use the word ‘GET’ in

the all of our ads for greater call-to-action emphasis.

Ads with the following extensions had a higher CTR compared to ads which didn’t show these.

Therefore it becomes implicit to maintain position in ‘Top’ ads compared to ‘Others’ otherwise

these extensions wouldn’t be displayed.

5. Use Google Analytics: Google Analytics can give some very important key insights. Use it to

make your campaign effective by tracking bounce rates, session duration and do cohort

analysis too.

6. Target Women: This is age of Millenials and Indie-Woman’s spending is on the rise. As we

can see from the below graphs, more than 60% of the

traffic, both SEO & Adwords, comprises of woman.

Create Personas of target groups and design your

website & sales funnel optimising for their journey.

7. Lastly, schedule ads by the time of the day

This table shows

impressions vs clicks

for time and day of

the week. Since our

target groups are

from the working

population, we had

scheduled ads from

9:00 AM – 9:00 PM IST. First three days of the week offer greater return and it makes sense to

bid aggressively on these days by grabbing a larger impression share than competitors.

Extensions Impressions CTR

Call Extensions 3268 4.47%

Call-Out Extensions 8174 5.13%

Site-links Extensions 81424 4.24%

63%

37%

Organic

Female

Male

73%

27%

Adwords

Female

Male

Learning Objectives and Outcomes | Businesses have started to allot more of their marketing

budget to the digital marketing to reach with customers & build relationships. Google Ad words

has proved to be an effective tool in this respect. With the Google analytics and clear tracking of

impression, CTR & conversion, business can track money allotted and what is ROI per dollar

spend. During pre-launch period, we went through the digital marketing course given on the

GOMC page. Our focus was on understanding A/B testing, Second Price auction, and quality

score calculation effectively. Major part of the learning about the Adwords happened during the

campaign. We understood that there is no one formula to succeed. It matters a lot on the industry

you are and how your competitors are using Adwords. All this makes Adwords campaigns very

dynamic and gives a lot of control like daily budget, Maximum Bid etc. As a marketer we can

see bounce rate, how much time visitors are spending on the website etc. we can clearly show the

value to the business.

We learned that customer-centred Ad words will always result in High CTR and Low Bounce rate

ultimately resulting in high conversion. We understood why Google stress on the point that Ad

should be relevant to your offerings. This is because if customer gets what he looks for, he will

keep coming to you and you will get a loyal customer. We learned that if campaign is watched and

monitored closely, it is possible to get high ROI.

Group Dynamics | our team had members from diverse backgrounds but all were passionate about

digital marketing. We wanted to learn how Google Adwords work and what the best practices are.

In the initial phase we all worked together so as to build a complete understanding but later we

divided us into 3 groups responsible for each of the 3 campaigns. We used to compete against each

other to develop healthy competition. We had weekly review meeting where we used to ask tough

questions to each other for budget allocation to respective campaigns. It was purely performance

driven allocation and we discussed key insights.

Client Dynamics | Our Client Evibe was very cooperative throughout the campaign. The Founders

of the company are very young and dynamic. They are very tech-friendly and understood clearly

what Google Adwords is all about. They had previously run a Facebook ocpm campaign which

according to them, was not very effective.

As participants of management studies, the Google Online Marketing Challenge proved very

effective for us in putting things to perspective and applying classroom concepts to real life. We

plan to give Adwords & Analytics exam too.