This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.

One of the benefits that we factored in when we considered doing a campaign of this sort is search engine optimization. Doing the Naked Campaign meant that we could write about a lot of the things that we talk about internally in a public-facing way. Naturally that means that words that we care about would show up related to us in search engines.

There is, of course, no guarantee that we will show up high enough in any particular search to make it worth the effort from that point of view alone (and certainly there’s more to ranking high than just having particular words in your content), but the potential side effect was definitely worth factoring in.

So, is it working?

In short, yes. Since the Naked Campaign started, keywords that show up exclusively in articles related to the campaign have accounted for 20% of our organic search traffic.

Here are the phrases that have sent us traffic so far:
Adwords
madebyfight.com/naked
invalid http response code adwords
free $250 dollar google adwords
keyword suggestion tool
linkedin directads coupon

Especially interesting is the fact that the most popular keyword (AdWords) also had the lowest bounce rate at 40%. This means that 6 out of every 10 visitors from this search term went on to read further into the site, which is extraordinary for our site generally speaking, much less for search terms. This isn’t particularly surprising as our program is built around AdWords (and the lesser-searched-for DirectAds), but it is encouraging to know that the targeting appears to be effective.

Perhaps you’ve come to this page via a search? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. What caught your interest enough to click, and did you find what you expected to find?

This is part of a series of articles about how Fight is approaching using some free advertising. It all kicks off here.

It’s time to check in on how our ads are performing. Let’s take a look.

LinkedIn has served 8,095 impressions and delivered 0 clicks. We pay only for clicks, so this would be ok if we saw an uptick in traffic that we could attribute to LinkedIn. But we don’t. So this is a problem. The problem here is that we may not be being pragmatic enough with our ads. The closest one to speaking directly to what we do in the most straightforward sense is “We Are Fight”.

DirectAds only lets you run 10 ads as part of the same campaign and we’re using all of them, so we’re going to take the ad that seems the farthest from the mark and replace it with one is trying to be as on the mark as possible: “Marketing Strategy. We do this every day. Follow the Naked Campaign to see how.”. The ad that seems like it would be the least effective is: “Do you read these ads?”. Nowhere in the ad does it say what we do, so it can easily come off as a research panel.

Of course, DirectAds has no easy way to retire an existing ad (you can turn it off and hide it, but it still takes up one of your 10 buckets), so we’re going to have to edit the ad that we want to get rid of to have the copy for the new ad we want to put in. We’ll see how that effects the stats for the ad (we updated the ad when it had 871 impressions and no clicks), but it’s too bad their tool wasn’t a bit more capable. I’d love to have the option of turning the old ad back on if the new ad doesn’t perform.

Also, since the ads have gotten no clicks, we’ve spent none of our credit, so we’re raising our daily spend from $10 ($250/25 days) to $13.38 ($250/18 days). We’re well above the suggested CPC bid range at $5, so we’ll hold steady there and see what happens.

By contrast, AdWords is ticking along steadily, serving slightly fewer impressions but garnering 11 clicks (for a click through rate of 0.14%). It’s too early to say what ads are performing well as we’ve had clicks across 9 of the 22 ads in rotation. Of those 11 clicks, 8 of them came from Google’s Display Network, which is comprised of all of the sites that use AdSense. If you are letting AdWords manage which sites get to see your ads (as we are), then you need to have a minimum level of volume before Google will tell you what sites got how many impressions. We’re not yet to that point, but when we see where they’re going, we’ll let you know.

Of the 3 clicks that came from the SEM proper, somewhat surprisingly they came from some of the simplest, broadest terms that we’re using (we’re currently running 87 search phrases): “analytics”, “campaign”, and “AdWords”. In some senses, based on the content of our ads, this is not surprising, and Google agrees sending these terms substantially more impressions than most of the rest of them.

For AdWords, we’re going to let things sit for a while longer until more obvious trends emerge, but here are some early returns on the best performing AdWords ads sorted by CTR:

The top performer will probably jump out at you right away as it took only 13 impressions to get a click! It will be interesting to see how that one continues to perform. Worth noting is that the reason that it has received so few impressions relative to anything else, was that it originally had “Google” in the title, and was rejected for it, so it didn’t start running until very recently.

Goal Stats

DirectAds Impressions: 8,095
DirectAds Clicks: 0

AdWords Impressions: 8,013
AdWords Clicks: 11

Twitter Followers (current, all types): 255 (-1.2% since start)
RSS Followers (7 day avg): 17 (-5.6%)
Unique Visitors (30 days): 541 (+1.3%)
Comments (campaign, total): 0