Once we had set up The Marvegos Fine Art School with a website and several functioning nurture campaigns for prospects and registered students we recommended testing digital advertising targeted locally. The site traffic showed that more than 50% of visitors were coming from Google searches so we started with Google Adwords in two markets in which the art studios still had capacity. We tested many keywords that had proved successful for site traffic and experimented with several ads before we arrived at the ads shown here.

The ad featured here is descriptive — “Drawing, Painting and Sculpting” — and offers a strong CTA (call-to-action) — “Free Intro Lessons.” Both elements proved key to success.

The summer proved to be completely different.  During the school year “art classes” dominated but during the summer “summer camp” with negative keywords for all the types of summer camps we DIDN’T want proved to be the ticket in terms of impressions, clicks and conversions. With this particular campaign we tested many keywords around the “camp” and “classes” theme, as well as the “programs” theme, but quickly zeroed in on “summer camp” and “art camps.”

Tracking in Google Adwords was limited by our inability to put Google Adwords tracking code on a final purchase page because of the booking software used so we tracked everything in Wicked Reports.