AdWords Campaign Strategy

This week, our group started to work on our GOMC strategy. Our client is the American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST), publisher of the CHESTJournal, which is the global leader in advancing best patient outcomes through innovative chest medicine education, clinical research, and team-based care. The organization provides educational, leadership, and networking opportunities to its membership.

The AdWords account will consist of five campaigns targeted nationally in order to expand the organization’s customer base and reach the niche market looking for board review courses in the areas of pediatric pulmonology, pulmonology, and critical care. In order to have a very concentrated campaign, ads will solely run on Google’s Search Network. 5 campaigns are planned according to different product, and will direct users to different webpages. 

The 5 products are:

1. CHEST Pediatric Pulmonary Board Review

2. CHEST Critical Care Medicine Board Review

3. CHEST Pulmonary Medicine Board Review

4. CHEST ABIM Critical Care Medicine and Pulmonary Disease SEP Models

5. CHEST Board Review Courses 2014 

Also, we set the negative keywords to narrow down our search area and exclude some customers that we aren’t interested in reaching. The bidding strategy will be based on obtaining an average position of 2.5 by bidding $0.15 to $0.20 higher than the first page bid estimate. The Traffic Estimator will be used to evaluate projected cost-per-click (CPC) and amount of clicks for new keywords. Keywords that generate high impressions, with corresponding click-through rates (CTRs) lower than .90% will be dropped. To optimize the Return on Ad Spend, all campaigns will start with a smaller budget in the beginning, and will be increased each week.

We’re excited to launch the campaigns and assist the organization in meeting their strategic goals, and learn more about AdWords. And, of course, win the 2014 Google Online Marketing Challenge!

Adventures in AdWords: GOMC Group Blog Post

As we embark on our Google Online Marketing Challenge project, we wanted to give a brief overview of the organization we have selected, as well as highlight three Adword features we felt were noteworthy and important additions to a marketer’s toolkit.

American College of Chest Physicians (CHEST) is the organization we have selected for our GOMC team. The organization is a professional medical society and offers membership, leadership, as well as several educational opportunities to pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine clinicians. We have worked with the organization and determined that their annual board review courses are a good fit. The courses prepare physicians for taking their board certification exams, and also offer a boot camp-like opportunity for other clinicians who are not required to take board examinations.

Now, on to Adwords! Adwords is a familiar concept, but there is more to the tool than simply paying for advertising. Lets check out three important features helping to connect individuals with products and organizations.

· Ad Rank Formula. How does Google decide which company’s advertisement will show up first when a customer uses it’s keywords in his / her search? We had assumed like many others that money was the deciding factor. But Google actually uses a formula to determine the ranking order of competing ads. This New Ad Rank Formula is has three components, the Max Bid, Quality Score and the expected impact from your ad extensions and formats. Ad Rank plays a huge role in determining the prominence of the ads on a search results page and the cost-per-click.

· RLSA or Remarketing Lists for Search Ads. An other important feature is RLSA or Remarketing Lists for Search Ads, which lets companies customize it’s search ads campaign for people who have previously visited it’s site and tailor bids/ads to these visitors when they're searching on Google. When people leave a site without buying anything, remarketing lists for search ads helps the company reconnect with these potential customers as they continue using Google Search. Companies can set your bids, create ads, or select keywords, keeping in mind that these customers have previously visited your website.  Adding code to every page of companies’ website allows the code will be added to the user’s cookie and they will be on the remarketing lists.  Companies can reach them when they search on Google or other websites, which display Google advertisements.

· Enhanced Sitelinks. Finally new Enhanced Sitelinks provide advertisers with far greater control over the appearance of their ads. For example, companies can now schedule its sitelinks to talk about lunch specials at lunch time, or dinner specials in the evening. (Genius!) Moreover, it can designate sitelinks as being mobile preferred, thus providing an opportunity to present ads that are more relevant to the user context (i.e. where, what time, and from what device did the search originate from). Best of all, it can all be done within a single campaign now.

We’re looking forward to putting these tools to use to promote the CHEST Board Review courses with Adwords this quarter.