Web Ads: September 2018

Starting in August, we began running web ads on the newly rebranded Google Ads platform to drive additional traffic to the Wonderful Machine photographer directory. Google Ads allows us to increase visibility for all of our photographers to art buyers worldwide that may not have heard of Wonderful Machine before.  We began our ad with simple targeting of all audiences and demographics between the ages of 18 and 65+ that are identified as interested in Photo & Video Services. Throughout August, we focused on tuning our ads, continually editing our targeted keywords and refining negative keywords. Because Google Ads segmentation doesn’t distinguish between commercial and retail audiences, we use negative keywords to dissociate our ads with retail-focused keywords like kids, family, headshot, as well as other kinds of queries we don’t want to be associated with, such as sexy. Based on the work in August, we were able to begin ramping up our ad spend in September using the same criteria we had been focusing on. We focused on worldwide search but restricted our ad run to Monday through Friday at 6:30 AM – 7:30 PM Eastern time. Day/hour impressions show that this is fairly restrictive on the early side, but there is a steep traffic drop off in the afternoons. October’s ad buy has been adjusted to 5:30 AM – 8:00 PM with additional allowances for Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which will start at 4:00 AM (Tues.) and end at 9:00 PM (Weds.) to capitalize on increased clickthrough rates during those times. Overall, performance has been significantly higher than our previous ad buys in 2017. September’s performance netted us 110,000 impressions and 1,660 clickthroughs. In this separated view we have impressions on the left in red and clickthroughs on the right in blue. Got questions about Google Ads for Photographers? Give us a call at 610.260.0200 or reach out!