Adwords increase conversions by 55% for Adventures Cross Country!

Search Engine Optimisation 

Murray (2005) compares search engine optimization to a big election.  He writes, “All the websites in the world are candidates. The copy on your website is your campaign.  Links to your website are votes. The more votes (links) a candidate (webiste) has the more important it is and the higher it’s ranking.” This quote emphasis the vast change in communication and how the advertising world and the way people source information is changing. The diagram illustrates 1o steps that can be taken to help an organisation enhance their online presence.

Adventures Cross Country (ARCC) is an organization established in 1983 which organizes trips, specifically for teens to volunteer during summers to help others in a range of activities from teaching to building. However Adventure Cross Country was presented with a common challenge akin to other small companies. They had a fantastic website but didn’t know how to drive the target demographic to view it. This was especially challenging in an overcrowded market place where there are millions of similar volunteering organizations. The solution to this problem was obvious …. ADWORDS!

Marshall and Todd (2006), authors of ‘The Ultimate Guide to Google adwords: How to access 100 million people in 10 minutes’ write “Google adwords can help your business whether you’re the provervial little old lady selling quilts in Eastern Kentucky or the multinational corporation. They can be the traffic monster that feeds your autopilot marketing machine and churns out a profit for you every day and every night, hitting the entire world up for customers whilst you sleep.”

In this way, Adventures Cross Country found that one of the most effective ways to increase traffic was to insert more key words. Through campaigns it was clear that just searching for words including ‘a trip for teens’ weren’t cutting it. Rather than spending hours researching and finding combinations of words to surpass competitors, ARCC used Google tools to generate key words alongside statistics showing the competition for the terms and the average search volume. As a result ARCC found over 300 new key terms. This lead to a number of international volunteers applying from a much larger geographical scale, 17% more clicks, 50 % more impressions and 55% more conversions, so all in all ...  A huge Success!!