WordStream Names Winner in $25,000 Grade and Get Paid Competition
(PRWEB) February 06, 2018 -- WordStream Inc., a provider of online advertising software and services, has announced the winner of its second “Grade and Get Paid” competition, a contest that leveraged the company’s award-winning AdWords Performance Grader to find and reward a business able to significantly improve its Google AdWords account performance over the course of 30 days.
WordStream announced the contest in September 2017, challenging AdWords advertisers to see how quickly they could improve the performance of their paid search accounts. Entrants were asked to run the AdWords Performance Grader twice: once to establish a baseline performance benchmark, and again at the conclusion of the 30-day period to see whether any improvements in performance had been made. Participants were also asked to answer two simple questions: what they learned from the experience, as well as what they would do differently next time.
Common themes in the entrants’ responses to the question, “What did you learn from your report?” included a need to improve Quality Scores and problems with landing pages, both highlighted by almost 20% of entries. Asked what they would do differently, entrants commonly cited plans to add more negative keywords and work on ad optimization and click-through rate.
The winning advertiser was Omega Learning – South Hills, a K-12 tutoring and test preparation company based in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania. The small, two-year-old business won $25,000 in AdWords spend to fuel its campaigns in 2018, along with a year-long subscription to WordStream Advisor, WordStream’s online advertising management software, to ensure they make the most of that spend.
Omega Learning’s owner, Jim Valancius, said that he learned a great deal during the competition, particularly the importance of relevant keywords and compelling ad copy.
“I learned a ton from our first report card,” Valancius says. “There was clearly a misalignment of who we were trying to target versus who was clicking on our ads. We started to spend more time on monitoring our account throughout the week, and just seeing how much of a difference occurred in 30 days was motivating. Making small changes made such a big difference.”
By eliminating irrelevant keywords, adjusting match types, and making other small optimizations, Valancius saw an immediate improvement in the performance of his AdWords campaigns. By the end of the competition, Omega Learning’s AdWords Performance Grader score was 15% higher than it had been at the start of the contest, an improvement that secured the win for the test preparation company.
WordStream’s AdWords Performance Grader has been run over 2 million times, analyzing more than $14 billion in cumulative unique annual spend, and is completely free to use. Grade your AdWords account today to see how you can improve your AdWords campaigns.
About WordStream, Inc.
WordStream, Inc. provides software and services that help marketers get the maximum results from their online marketing efforts. WordStream's easy-to-use software allows for more effective paid search and social campaigns with the 20-Minute Work Week, a customized workflow that guides marketers through steps that can greatly improve their AdWords, Bing, and Facebook campaigns, plus tools for call tracking, keyword optimization, and more. WordStream also offers an award-winning PPC tool, the AdWords Performance Grader, which evaluates users' Google AdWords accounts and provides valuable tips for improvement. WordStream is a Google Premier Partner.
Elisa Gabbert, WordStream Inc., http://www.wordstream.com, +1 617-780-7979, [email protected]
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