The Heavy Chef Project

Some of you may be wondering what ever happened to that wonderful website the Heavy Chef Team were promoting with the help of Andy Harris at Custwin. You know the one with the replica art work. Well due to busy schedules its taken a bit of a back seat lately, but with his usual work hard (play hard) attitude Andy has kicked the ball back into play with a great walk through of how he set up the campaign. This is a great guide for anyone in the process or thinking about setting up a campaign.

Returning to the Art Revision project, we decided that with an adequate landing page on the Art Revision site in place, the PPC campaign could be created.

Initially we’re ‘testing the water’ while also creating a structure that can be replicated for artists other than Van Gogh, who we’ve started with.

The first stage in any PPC campaign is to think about all the obvious phrases that people may type and to create them so that they’re flexible.  Although not an exhaustive list, the following is what I created in a column within Excel …

1 replica
1 replicas
1 reproduction
1 reproductions
1 art reproduction
1 art reproductions
1 duplicate
1 duplicates
1 duplication
1 copy
1 copies
1 painting
1 paintings
1 art
1 artwork

The most relevant phrases are at the top and are the ones we ideally want clicks from.

With that column created in Excel we can duplicate it and use it again and again.  For now though we’ll just tell Excel to replace "1" with "Van Gogh" down that column (so we end up with phrases such as ‘Van Gogh replica’, ‘Van Gogh replicas’ etc.).  It’s important to include plurals of words because Google does differentiate between singular and plurals (whereas Yahoo doesn’t).  We’ve now created our basic list.

Now in the next columns of the spreadsheet we’re going to list of all Van Gogh paintings but take variations into consideration.  For example, column B of the spreadsheet would contain:

1 Potato Eaters
1 The Potato Eaters
Potato Eaters
The Potato Eaters

Then column C would contain another painting such as:

1 Starry Night
1 The Starry Night
Starry Night
The Starry Night

We could also optionally have quotation marks and brackets around those if we wanted the searches to be more specific (e.g. "The Starry Night") but don’t need to for the puposes of this campaign.

What we end up with is several columns of paintings, including those with "1".  Now we highlight all the columns in the spreadsheet and replace "1" with "Van Gogh".  So, that column B in the example becomes:

Van Gogh Potato Eaters
Van Gogh The Potato Eaters
Potato Eaters
The Potato Eaters

This means that we get several variations of phrases that could be typed by people interested in each type of artwork.  Being realistic, few people are going to type something like "Van Gogh Potato Eaters Reproduction" or "Potato Eaters Reproduction" (although you could go to that depth if wanting to) and it’s generic phrases such as "Van Gogh Reproductions" that will suffice.

Now we need to create our PPC campaign called ‘Van Gogh’ in Google Adwords.  We’re assuming that we’ve set up the campaign initially to have about 3 a day budget, keywords at a maximum of 15p per click (sorry, campaign being set up in UK so we’re talking pounds and pence), and that we’re aiming purely at the South African market.  We also set it up so that the adverts aren’t going to be visible on the Search network or Content network (there are several reasons why we exclude those - perhaps for another blog).

Next we create an Ad group called ‘General’ and we set a default maximum cost per click (CPC) of 15p.  That may, or may not be high enough but it’s important that we test the market before spending too much on individual click costs.  If over-paying, Google will quite happily expoit our stupidity.  In this Ad group we create the advert text as:

Van Gogh Art Reproduction
Hand-painted museum quality oil
painting replicas from R2500.

This advert text ensures that people typing general phrases such as ‘Van Gogh Reproduction’ will instantly see that the advert is highly relevant.  As we’re initially focusing the advertising on the South African market we also put in the ‘from’ pricing.  This shows people that the company is local and also discourages clicks from people adverse to paying R2500.

We link that advert specifically to the page http://www.artrevision.com/gallery.htm?sm[p1][category]=189&sm[p1][persistent]=1&, which has examples of Van Gogh paintings plus calls to action.

We then go to our Excel document and paste all the generic phrases (e.g. ‘Van Gogh replica’, ‘Van Gogh replicas’, ‘Van Gogh art reproduction’ etc.) into Google Adwords and we then have our first advert group live.

Because we’ve set up the template in Excel we can later go back and copy the template (e.g. ‘1 replica’, ‘1 art reproduction’) and can replace the "1" with another artist featured on the site (e.g. Degas) - then we just have to change the first line of that advert text so that it refers to the other artist.  With Google Adwords, if you can get away with it, it’s best to create the title so that it can be adapted easily and the description lines of the text so that they’re generic, but they still fit in with the title line.  When creating very targeted campaigns, which take some time, this is the fastest way to get results that are effective.

We can now create the advert groups related to specific paintings in a slightly different way.  Firstly, we know from research that the level of competition for specific painting names is low and so we set the advert groups up at 15p per click allowance initially, which is ample.  We also need to come up with a generic advert text structure that is easy to recreate for each column of the spreadsheet containing details about specific paintings by Van Gogh.  One such example is for Cafe Terrace at Night, which has the advert text of:

Cafe Terrace at Night
Hand-painted museum quality oil
painting reproductions from R2500.

The title line is limited to 25 characters and each description line to 35 characters and so it’s always a challenge to create an advert that stands out but says enough.  We couldn’t do much more with the title line, although shorter artwork titles would allow us to add ‘Van Gogh’ and I toyed with putting ‘Van Gogh in the description lines but considered it more important to focus on the key messages of reproductions and price, assuming that most people typing a Van Gogh artwork name would know that it was referring to Van Gogh anyway. In the cases of the shorter painting names though, it was possible to build ‘Van Gogh’ into the title lines.

We then add all the ‘Cafe Terrace at Night’ keyword phrase variations from our spreadsheet (copied and pasted) and continue creating all the other advert groups until all the Van Gogh pictures are created within the campaign.

What we’ve done is create lots of advert groups, each very targeted, but in some ways they’re very similar in the text used in the advert text, which means not much work has to be done on the adverts because Google always brings up the previous advert created when creating a new one so it’s just the title line that has to be altered.   What we also have is a ‘template’ in Excel that we can keep forever.  Therefore, if the Google campaign generates lots of business then we can use that same spreadsheet setup to create a campaign in Yahoo, MSN, and others and don’t have to go through the pain of recreating the campaign that would have been necessary if we’d typed the keyword phrases etc. straight into the Google system without using the Excel intermediary stage.

We could have gone into much deeper detail on creating more potential keyword variations but have covered most bases here and are now highly visible in Google when anyone in the South African market searches for artwork related to Van Gogh.

Now, we wait and assess how well the clicks have been doing, and how well they’re converting to enquiries over the next week.  My personal expectation of clients is that a 5-10% clicks to enquiries ratio should be possible once a campaign has been refined.  In a week or so we’ll have a view about how well our adverts are positioned and can make adjustments as necessary.  If, after a period of adjustments, where our advert positioning in Google is strong, the enquiries rate isn’t high enough we then have to consider why that may be.

But that’s all till next time……

Andy Harris - Custwin - The Pay Per Click Experts