In October of 2004, IdeaLab had the task set before us to use allocated funds to increase email newsletter subscriptions to the WomenTodayMagazine.com eNewsletter. We decided to use these funds by creating a pay-per-click (ppc) campaign using Google AdWords. The resulting traffic would then move them to our specially designed landing pages in hopes to increase our subscription rate. The following is a visual of how this process worked.Our first step was to decide what keywords we would like to purchase so that when people searched for them, our ad would come up. After brainstorming over 100 different keyword and keyword phrases (including variations of spellings for some), we realized we had four main groupings: generic, spiritual, health, and community.We decided it would be best to create 4 sub-campaigns, or “buckets” or “groups” in Google’s AdWords campaign site – one for each grouping. We took all the keywords that seemed to fit each group then wrote a group of ads, then designed a landing page and a thank you page. This process was repeated for different keywords for each campaign (therefore there’d be a different set of ads, different landing page, and different action page for each). In this study, we’ll focus on the generic one group.

When someone searched for our specific keywords in Google, Google then responded by “serving up” or displaying one of the ads we wrote. This is called an impression. Once someone clicked on the ad, we paid a determined price (set in the campaign settings per keyword) and the visitor was then taken to our landing page. This is called a click thru. If they chose to subscribe to our newsletter from our landing page, they were taken to the thank you page (or action page) where a bit of HTML code was placed so Google knew that the user made it to our action page. This is called a conversion. Some of the generic keywords we used included terms such as “online newsletter”, “e-newsletter”, “women newsletter”, and “web newsletter”. Here is an example of a search in Google for “women newsletter”:

As you can see, our ad was served up under the “Sponsored Links” to the right of the search results. In this case, our ad was in the first spot. Once someone clicked on our ad, they were taken to the following landing page.

As you can see, this landing page is a much slimmed down version of the womentodaymagazine.com website. The point was to keep down the distractions and move them directly to the subscription form. We reinforced the generic term “women newsletter” at the top and in the first paragraph. We gave them a sample of the newsletter and an option to browse the site if they wanted to. We of course also gave them a link to our privacy policy.When they filled out the subscribe form and pressed the “subscribe” button, they were taken to our thank you page.

The thank you page was a very simple page that said “thank you” and then took them to the womentodaymagazine.com homepage within a few seconds. If they were not taken there, they were given the option to click on a link to take them there. Included on this page is a tracking code from Google AdWords so Google would know that this campaign (keyword, ad, and conversion) were all a success.