February 01, 2001
Case Study

How Moreover Got 10.21% Click Through on Ads Driving Traffic to News Coverage Online

SUMMARY: No summary available.
CHALLENGE
When Thomas Korte, Director of Marketing at
Moreover.com, came in to work the morning of the US election
last November, the company's editors had been hard at work for
hours selecting the best news headline picks for their
syndicated headline service.

Although Moreover doesn't normally market itself as a
destination site for news seekers, Korte says, "The editors
had pulled an all-nighter, so I really wanted to reward them
with quite a bit of traffic." Only problem was he only had a
few hours to mount a campaign, and a total budget of just
$500.

CAMPAIGN
As Korte surfed the Web looking for ideas he noticed
that the marketers at Google, a leading search engine, were
also hoping to get some extra mileage from the election by
placing a special "Vote" graphic in their logo just for the
day. When Korte clicked on it, Google automatically searched
for the term "election."

Korte was already a fan of Google's demographic, "They have a
high class audience compared to other search engines. Any
professional these days is at Google." So, he grabbed his
credit card and signed onto Google's online ad buying service,
AdWords (see link below.) He limited spending to his budget
of $500, and bought small text ads to appear whenever a user
searched Google under terms such as 'election', 'election
2000' and 'vote'.

Luckily the AdWords program allows you to track your results
as they happen. So, Korte and his team gathered round the
monitor to watch the click throughs come in, while the rest of
America was watching votes. After the first 1,000
impressions, Korte optimized search terms by keeping the terms
that got the highest rate, dropping the low ones and testing a
few more. He continued optimizing all morning until he'd
spent his limit of $500 for a total of 26,900 impressions,
equaling an end cost of $18.59/m.

RESULTS
Moreover's small text ads hit an average of 10.21%
click through rates, starting from a low of 8.6% for the first
1,000 and then building higher as Korte optimized. Korte
says, "I would never have believed we could get results like
that for Internet advertising in 2001."

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