The campaign focused on five ad groups for Comic Asylum: Comic Books, Card Games, Magic the Gathering, Tabletop Games, and Tournaments. The goals were to achieve a 0.2% click-through rate with focus on Comic Books. The Comic Books ad group performed best, achieving the campaign goals. Future recommendations include focusing AdWords efforts on comics and updating Comic Asylum's website to better reflect comic book inventory and information.

1. Executive Summary
Campaign Overview
Our campaign focused on five aspects of Comic Asylum's operations. The two goals of
the campaign were to obtain a click through rate of 0.2% with primary focus on the Comic
Books adgroup. The Comic Asylum campaign would focus on five ad groups focusing on Magic
the Gathering, Comic Books, Tabletop Games, Card Games, and Tournaments. Adgroups will
contain various keywords, ads, and use a manual bidding process for a three-week period.
Key Results
The primary success of the campaign belongs to the Comic Books ad group, which
dominated the campaign. Card Games, Tournaments, and Magic the Gathering contributed clicks
in addition to Comic Books and Tabletop Games had no activity. This campaign was met with
increased business and online presence for Comic Asylum. With other rivals in the industry used
as a benchmark, Comic Asylum appears to have gained significantly increased Internet traffic
and visits to their physical location.
Conclusion
The campaign was an overall success in achieving our goals. The Comic Books adgroup
proved to be the best performer and should be a main focus for Comic Asylum following the end
of the challenge.
Future Online Marketing Recommendation
Comic Asylum's best course of action is to update the website content to better reflect
comic books. Additionally, if they choose to continue adwords comics should be their focus.

2. Industry Component
Campaign Overview and Strategy Evolution
Starting the Google Online Marketing Challenge we had two goals in mind, which were
to achieve a click through rate of at least 0.20 % to achieve higher activity to the Comic Book
category and Tournament category. Our initial setup was to have a single campaign, five ad
groups, and use Google’s automated. The single campaign was named after the store while the
ad groups would be named Comic Books, Card Games, Magic the Gathering, Tournaments, and
Tabletop Games. These are the major components of the stores operations and specifically we
would be attempting to bring higher recognition to their comic sales in the Dallas County area. In
three weeks time, 04/07/14 to 04/28/14, we learned what brought the best results, what strategies
weren't effective, and how one could better utilize adwords in the future.
In the first week we were prepared with 55 keywords and a five ads. The campaign was
set to automate bids with a daily budget of $15. We overestimated our understanding of adwords
and were left with many changes to make in order to reach our goals. Our first change was that
the automated bidding system would not allow for high clicks or a first page position. All of our
bids were evenly distributed at around $1.00 to $1.10 while the majority of ours keywords
required $4 or higher for first page visibility. This led to a switch in manual bidding across all ad
groups. This allowed us to set our bids close to or at the first page bids. By doing so we were
able to pinpoint what keywords were doing well, which keywords were not, and where to
allocate higher bids. While we did increase our bids we were still cautious to use first page bids
of $5 or more. By the end of the first week it was apparent that even if certain keywords
demanded high first page bids that the actual cost per click might not even be close to the bid.
We increased most of our keyword bids to their first page bid in order to accurately find our best

3. performing words. The campaign was checked daily in the morning to make sure changes
received the benefit of a full days run. At the end of the week we had 13 clicks, 7,000
impressions, a cost of $14.36 for all clicks, and a click through rate of 0.18%. This is shown
through a clicks vs cost comparison graph below.
In week two our goals and strategies had
changed and many updates had been made to the
campaign. While we still had a goal of a 0.2% CTR, we wanted to increase the number of clicks
and the quality score of our keywords. We first decided to tackle the issue of quality score. We
did this by adding an additional 93 keywords, 54 negative keywords, creating six ads that
contained more of our current keywords, and re-adding keywords to contain modified and broad
search attributes. The initial change was extremely satisfying. Keywords that had scores of 1/10
were now 7/10 after becoming a modified keyword. This was huge for us since many of our
words weren't generating clicks because of their low score preventing the ads from showing. The
next thing we did to help our quality score was to start keyword diagnoses on a daily basis to
give us a better understanding of where our bids need to be and where our keyword quality
stands. This created a need not to only check the campaign daily, but to make changes daily as
well. This was still done in the morning so changes received a full days run. The next change we
made to raise our clicks was by keeping the majority of our keywords at first page bids or higher
and increasing our daily budget. Since our first week only spent a single days budget we found it
necessary to increase our daily budget to $20. The final change we made for during the week was
to start pausing keywords that were achieving 200+ impressions with no clicks. By doing this we
would be able to increase our total CTR by eliminating the words receiving large impressions
with no clicks. At the end of week two we had 22 more clicks, 11,000 more impressions, $43.23

4. spent in the week, and a CTR of 0.19%. The following graph again reflects the clicks vs cost for
the second week.
By the beginning of our
third week we were fairly confident
in our campaign. We were getting closer to our goal and believed it would be accomplished by
the end of the week. Through this week very few changes were made to the campaign. We were
still running the keyword diagnoses, keeping up with our first page bid changes, and increased
our daily budget to $50 and $100 on the last days. On April 29th, 2014 we paused the campaign
ending our three week campaign run. Week three ended with 37 more clicks, 12,000 more
impressions, $104.47 spent, and a CTR of 0.3%. The following is the last clicks vs cost graph for
week three. We had reached our primary goal during that week, but what still remains is how the
three weeks in total did as this was
the true deciding factor for our goal.
Results
The following table shows the results of the campaign. We reached and exceeded our
primary goal and partially met our secondary goal. Comic Books proved to be the star adgroup
through the campaign run.
We think what contributed
to the its success is the large
involvement of various
comic publishers such as
Marvel and DC in the movie industry. The movies had such large popularity it turned people to
the comics to continue where the movie stopped. The top 3 performing keywords in the this

5. adgroup were “DC Comics”, “Marvel +Comics”, and “Marvel Comics” which the last keyword
is not shown due to an accidental deletion in the second week.
Card Games was the second best performing with the top keyword being “magic the gathering
singles.” The reason this keyword phrase received the clicks it did while only one other keyword
received one click was most likely due to the high demand for individual cards, or singles,
instead of sealed
product. The next
adgroup is Magic the Gathering that had three performing words that received one click each.
What led to these clicks was primarily the connection to events of a popular card game. While
there were a few other keywords that also contained similar phrases these were the most popular.
Our last active ad group was Tournament,
which had two clicks. The primary focus
here was to catch the eye of people who
wanted to participate in events specific to Dallas. This adgroup could have outdone Magic the
Gathering if we had not added tournament phrases into that group, but the reasoning for it was
the phrases in Magic the
Gathering were broad while
the phrases in Tournaments were specific to the location. The last adgroup, Tabletop Games,
didn't perform at all. It was very odd that it didn't receive a single impression. It is understood
that fantasy tabletop gaming is attracted to a very niche group of people and typically the play
because it is meant to be an in person game as opposed to on the Internet.

6. Through the campaign there were many major changes that led to the given results. The
following point in the graph show when the changes were implemented with their corresponding
change in performance.
One very frustrating component of the adwords campaign was the quality score of
keywords. Keyword combinations that were very generic such as “Marvel Comics” were rated
1/10, but received the most impressions and clicks. Combinations that included locations
specifics, Dallas, raised these keywords to quality scores of 6/10 or higher, but because they
were specific most did not have ads that were shown. It both is logical and illogical that it works
this way. We expected that since we were targeting the people of the Dallas area that by adding
Dallas or DFW to most of our phrases it would pinpoint to the people in those areas looking for
Comics or in store events. The exact opposite happened was just by choosing our ads be located
to the Dallas area that the generic phrase was searched more often and clicked more often even if
it had a low quality score. An aspect that proved very effective was the modifying of words in
keyword combinations. It would raise the score of everything to at least a 5/10 which made
things a lot easier going into week two.
Conclusions and Future Recommendations
While they will continue to receive business for Magic the Gathering tournaments,
singles, and products this campaign shows that there is a great opportunity to fulfill a desire for
comics. If they took a moment to reconsider the content of their website and advertising they
could achieve the higher traffic for comics, which they desire. It would benefit Comic Asylum to
provide a section on their website for comics. Even as an informational section would be enough

7. to entice consumers to come to the store. The clicks are there, but with no information on the site
for comics once clicked they will not receive the transfer of search to action they desire.
At the end of this campaign there are two major pieces of advice to give. First is to add
content to your website that relates to the comics inventoried, the new issues received on a
weekly basis, and what is available for order. This alone should drive more traffic to the website
which will than drive traffic to the store leading to sales. The second piece of advice is to focus
future Google AdWord Campaign efforts on comics. If we had to redo the campaign we would
solely work with comic keywords and ad groups as they delivered so more clicks and
impressions than the other ad groups.
Learning Component
Learning objectives and outcome
In the Google Online Marketing Campaign, we hoped to learn how to effectively use
Google Adwords, in order to help bring more traffic towards Comic Asylum’s website, and bring
more new potential customers to the store itself. Specifically, what we wanted to learn was how
to work with a budget and how to work the bidding process.
As a team, we started off with everyone creating 5 different campaigns (Comic Books,
Card Games, Magic the Gathering, Tabletop Games, and Tournament) of what Comic Asylum
had to offer. We faced many challenges as far as trying to receive more clicks on the first week
or so. As it reached towards the end of the campaign, 2 (comic Books and Card Games) out of
our 5 different campaigns successfully received the most amounts of clicks. The results
fluctuated until the last week of the program, where we have reached our maximum amount of
clicks. We expected as a team for the Comic Book campaign to be successful. But, we didn’t
know that the rest of our campaigns would be unsuccessful in receiving clicks.

8. The one benefit we have learned from using Google AdWords is the amount of financial
control that it has as far as finding out how much we want to pay per click, or set as our daily
budget. As there are no minimum or maximum amount to pay, we learned that we had to manage
our bids to make the most of our budget. With the Comic Asylum Campaign, we started off our
Cost Per Click bid with $1 and then it was raised up to $4-$5. We found out that it takes money
to see results. The total number of clicks is 71, CTR is pretty low with 0.24%, the average CPC
is $2.33 and the total cost is $165.31. We also saw that our average position is 1.6.
Group Dynamics
Fortunately, the team we chose to execute this campaign had worked on previous projects
together so there was a sense of what each person’s capabilities and responsibilities were. We
were able to effectively separate each part of the project among ourselves however there were
sometimes when more work would have to be allocated to some members more than others since
we all researched and were responsible to different areas of knowledge of our client and the
project. Within the campaign, one of our members spoke with the client and as such we were
dependent on the information he would give us before we could continue with our own parts.
This dependency did not affect us negatively, however, as we were able to work together and
complete our responsibilities. It was unexpected how we would all end up helping out our other
members with their sections without help needing to be asked.
Client Dynamics
The client was helpful in giving us all the information we needed but the issues that arose
within our campaign were the result of bad interface with the client website. The way the store
composed their website made it difficult for our campaigns to receive clicks due to the lack of
organization in the website and the marketing used which was primarily focused on the selling of

9. Magic: The Gathering cards when most of the clicks would arrive from the comic section of our
campaign. We were forced to add more negative and positive keywords to try to alleviate this
phenomenon. Our client’s marketing suggestions did not work in their favor due to their website.
With such a structure, it was difficult to implement many of our planned strategies yet we pushed
on with the campaign. It was expected that our client would be helpful and give us the necessary
information but it was unexpected that due to the inefficiency of the website that our campaign
would not have the highest rating in the areas we wanted.
Future Recommendations:
Following the Google AdWords campaign we feel AdWords can add real value to a
company’s marketing strategy and becoming certified in AdWords is definitely something we all
agree is a good idea. We also learned that having a site design that is conducive to interaction
with its users is imperative to achieving PPC success, especially when you want them to interact
in a specific way with your website. In our case our goals of increasing traffic to the site for
purposes other than the purchase of Magic singles was not very effective, because the site design
really is only useful if that is the user’s reason for visiting the site. However, we will talk with
our client and get his thoughts on a potential site redesign to allow the site to serve a broader
purpose. Overall, the GOMC experience was overwhelmingly positive and we would
recommend AdWords for the vast majority of businesses.