The Netherlands Intergroup (http://www.aa-netherlands.org) in October 2013 started a trial Google AdWords search campaign. The idea was to carry A.A.’s message of recovery to English-speaking people in the Netherlands who use Google to find information about problem drinking or alcoholism.
The Intergroup’s PI Committee, including CER Chair Jeroen S., coordinated the campaign and shared early results with interested members around the Continental European Region.
In its first week, 8,606 ads were shown and 35 ads were clicked; however, no telephone calls were made with mobile phones directly from the advertisement.  Costs were €51.13, with average daily costs of €7.30.
The Click-Through Rate (or CTR) was 0.41%, which is abysmally low. The likely cause: targeting the wrong people. The two principal PI volunteers on the project made two changes in response to these preliminary results: (1) Only people with an English-language computer were targeted, and (2) the word “alcoholic” (and another popular term) was narrowed to “exact match only”.
The new settings improved CTR about five-fold, from 0.30% to 1.50%, but impressions plummeted from 2,990 on the Tuesday to only 92 on Friday. The PI team thought they had overshot the mark, so they reversed those changes. Impressions picked up again, but CTR plummeted. The second week of the campaign ended with 12,005 ads shown and 93 ads clicked.
An issue discovered was that quite a number of queries were outside our focus, including a lot of Dutch queries. The Intergroup does not want to serve these, for the site is English, and doing so would adversely affect the campaign’s Quality Score.
These keywords confirmed that the main issue with the campaign was focus: Ads were being shown to the wrong people, which pulled the CTR low. Google wants people to see relevant ads and campaigns with low figures like these get penalised through a low Quality Score. Â For a detailed copy of the report, including keywords, queries, and correlating results, please email the PI Officer.
If you have any comments or questions, or are interested in having access to the campaign, I would be glad to hear from you. Â Also, please feel free to share this article with anyone you think might benefit from it.
Michael K., CERÂ Public Information Officer
Editor’s note: this article has been published in accordance with our ArenA Editorial Policy.