Reflection of Google Analytics Courses

I found the two Google Analytic courses to be very challenging because I have never had to use this type of program before.  My group did not get the chance to use Google Analytics because our primary contact did not have control over the website so it was definitely a new learning experience for me. The videos had a lot of information in them, but it was difficult to retain all of that information when taking the final assessments. The questions that asked you to "please select all that apply" were very challenging because if you missed even one you got the entire question wrong. However, I have now passed both courses, but I feel like I would need to revisit those courses several times before I'll be able to completely grasp all of the content. I also found the Google Analytics Platform Principles to be a little more difficult as well. However, I would definitely recommend any company to start using Google Analytics on their website as soon as possible. It really can provide you with a ton of information that will allow you to manipulate your website and optimize it as best as possible.     

BUS572- Blog #4

Google Display Network and AdWords

Concept #1- Topics Targeting 

      One of the most important concepts that I learned this week is called "Topics Targeting". Topics Targeting allows you to place your AdWords ads on website pages that pertain to a certain topic. This allows your ad or ads to be displayed on the entire Display Network on pages that have certain content related to your topic. For example, if you have a vintage automobile business you can enable your ads to appear on any other type of web page that is related to automobiles, which could be motorcycles, SUVs, or sports cars. This can be extremely helpful because there are many potential customers out there that are interested in a variety of different automobiles. For instance, my neighbor owns a variety of motorcycles, but he also likes to collect vintage cars. If your business sold vintage automobiles, you could enable topic targeting on your website and have ads all over different automotive websites and forums. My neighbor could be looking to buy a new motorcycle on a certain website, but if you had topic targeting enabled, he might just see your ad pop up on one the motorcycle site he was looking at, therefore, possibly clicking on your vintage car ad. For more information about Topics Targeting click here. I understand the concept of Topic Targeting and its importance, but I'm still confused about how you would go about paying for this type of advertising. If you're already paying for an AdWords campaign, do you have to pay another fee to enable topic targeting? Or is it just another feature that you can use for free with AdWords?

Concept #2- Remarketing    

Source: http://www.adsmartonline.com/blog

      Another important concept that I learned during this session was remarketing. This concept allows you to reach out to users who have already visited your website. You can show them certain messages whether it be text, search display, or even offline media and advertise to users who have already visited your site, but did not purchase or convert on any of your products or services. Your business could create a remarketing list, save individuals who visited your "most popular page", and create a new AdWords campaign that is specifically designated for these users who have already visited your page. For example, say your business sold baseball equipment and you had a user on your site looking at baseball bats. This user didn't end up buying a baseball bat from your site, but continued exploring the web in search of a better deal or this user was just searching any other websites in general. Your business could then send this user a personalized message in an ad form, which could say something like "Save 20% off any new baseball bat within the next 24 hours". This could, in turn, grab the user's attention and the user might re-visit the website and make a purchase because of the online coupon he/she had just received while browsing another site. I believe that this marketing tactic is extremely important because I visit many different websites daily looking for items and I rarely ever make a purchase. If I were to see an ad about a site that I had previously visited and it had a coupon attached to the ad, I might reconsider visiting that site and end up making a purchase because of the coupon they had offered. This could also drastically increase a business's conversion rate and increase their ROI if they had an AdWords campaign in place. This tactic is obviously very useful, but I feel like this technique can also be very invading as well. What if businesses' started overloading internet users with remarketing ads, making the search for a product/service unbearable?  

Skill- Keyword Planner

      The biggest skill I've mastered this session would be using the Keyword Planner. The Keyword Planner is basically a workshop in which new and existing AdWords customers can build upon and edit their search network campaigns. There are a variety of features the Keyword Planner has to offer, such as, researching keywords, getting traffic estimates, and historical statistics. It also gives you suggestions on potentially new keywords that one may use in their AdWords campaign. For example, once our group had our Ad Groups established in the Keyword Planner, we found information about the average number of clicks, impressions, click-through-rates, etc that our campaign will received based off of historical statistics. I believe that this tool is extremely important because you can even figure out the average cost of each individual keyword (which we did in assignment #3). While doing our keyword price analysis, we even added in a few extra keywords because the planner tool had suggested that we use them. If this Keyword Planner wasn't in existence, we would have never come up with those extra keywords that it recommended for us. I believe this can be extremely beneficial for companies that are having a hard time developing keywords for their different online advertising campaigns. Although I'm finally able to navigate through the Keyword Planner, I think that the user interface is extremely confusing.  What if companies tried to use the Keyword Planner tool without any guided assistance like our class had? Do you think that most people would just give up trying to figure out how to use this critical tool?

Personal Learning Journey    

      This class is still one of the most confusing and challenging classes I've ever had to take here at Chatham. I'm finally feeling more comfortable with AdWords, but our campaign hasn't even started yet so that makes me a little nervous. I still can't seem to figure out how to get the $250 deposited into our account either. I'm excited for the competition to begin and I'm really interested in seeing how well our team does in the competition compared with other teams. I believe that we have a solid campaign and I think that our client will be very pleased once they see their ads up and running. We've just received feedback from our client as well and they are already thrilled with our campaign thus far, but we still need to make a few minor revisions. In the next session, I hope to learn more about the opportunities tool in AdWords so that our team can manipulate our ads throughout the challenge and gain a maximum ROI for our client.

Sources:

GOMC Digital Marketing Course: Display Advertising: Topic Targeting

GOMC Digital Marketing Course: Display Advertising: Remarketing 

 https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2999770?hl=en
 

BUS572- Blog #3

SEO: Emerging Trends and Display Advertising

Concept #1: Emerging Trends in SEO

       

        One of the most important concepts I learned from chapter six was the new emerging trends in Search Engine Optimization. I'm going to talk about localization and personalization. Localization is the practice of creating a local version of a specific Web site. By localizing, the search engine presents certain information in the geographic context and language of the user. For example, I just typed in "baseball" into my Google web browser. On the very first page, it show me a few different links about the Pittsburgh Pirates and on the right side of the results page, it showed me a map of where PNC Park is located in Pittsburgh. Search results are now being personalized to what a search engine thinks the user is actually interested in and this is called Personalization. Search engines do this by gathering information that you have searched for in the past, gathering information about your age, and they can gather information based on gender types. For example, I use Facebook on a daily basis and instead of going through the hassle of of typing in "www.facebook.com", I simply type in the letter "F" into the Google browser and the first organic search result I get is Facebook's web page and then I click on that link to bring me to Facebook.  It may not be that big of a deal to some people, but Google has allowed me to become even more lazy when I want to get onto Facebook by tailoring my search results to what I look up most. I believe that this is an extremely useful tool that will continue to grow because many surveys have suggested that people are in favor of personalization/localization and they are willing to trade personal information in order to get a more customized search result. However, I am concerned about the future of this tactic. What if people start giving search engines too much of their personal information. Will this make it easier for people to steal another individual's personal information and use it against them by stealing their credit cards or committing other fraud?

Concept #2: Display Advertising

         Another concept that I thought was very important was Display Advertising. Display Advertising is a form of online media that contains photos, text, or other logos. In today's world, Display Advertising is user friendly, rich, and engaging. There are four main types of Display Advertising which are: Banner, Video, Rich Media, and Sponsorship.  For example, a video ad would be what you see before you start to watch a video on YouTube.com. These are called "Pre-Roll" video ads because they are shown before you are able to watch the media clip of your choice and are usually just a few seconds long. This increases user engagement and will sometimes even entice the user to click on the video ad if they are interested in whatever the video ad is displaying. I believe that this type of advertising is extremely important for businesses and advertising agencies because the user must first watch the video ad before they can watch their video clip of choice. This is a great way to catch the user's attention because the video ad is playing right in the user's face and not off to the side like some other PPC ads. They are also very interactive, which might spark the user's interest as well. Personally, I cannot stand these ads, but I understand why advertisers make such ads. However, what if these ads begin to become longer and longer? Do you think that this will cause some users to stray away from sites, such as, YouTube and cause them look for their media on other sites that do not have these types of "Pre-Roll" video ads?

Skill- Ad Scheduling

       Ad Scheduling helps you control when you run your campaigns. Here is some more information about Ad Scheduling. There is basic mode in which you can control the days and different times you want your ad to be shown. Advanced mode will allow you to set bid multipliers for your ads, which can range from 10-1000% for different times of the day and week. For example, you see that your ads get the best results between 5pm-8pm.  During those hours, you can set a higher bid by using the bid multiplier tool and hopefully you'll achieve a higher traffic and conversion rate because of the higher bid. I believe that learning how to do Ad Scheduling will definitely helps our team with the GOMC. Up to this point, my team discussed that we were going to run our AdWords campaign for the full 21 days (all day), but now I believe that we should do some experimenting first to see, which time of the day is our ad is being shown the most. However, what if this bid multiplier tool puts us over our budget very quickly? I see the benefit in using this tool, but I also see it spending too much of our $250 budget. I'm wondering if this tool will  be more beneficial or detrimental for our campaign? 

Personal Learning Experience   

       So far this semester has been extremely challenging and overwhelming. My team is still having a lot of trouble trying to use Google AdWords and it's very frustrating. I think that the book does a great job of explaining the concepts and the videos help as well. In my opinion, I think that we should be in the computer lab more actually practicing with these Google AdWords tools instead of just listening to guest speakers. I believe that this would help myself and the rest of my classmates out tremendously because it would be some real hands-on experience. Hopefully, my teammates and I start to get a better grasp on these concepts soon so that we can be successful in this course.

Sources:

Stokes, R. (2011). emarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing. (V 1.0 ed.). Quirk Education. Retrieved from http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/19

  

https://www.google.com/partners/#p_content;idtf=lQQAAAAAAACVhM;

https://www.google.com/partners/#p_content;idtf=rQQAAAAAAACthM;

 

   

  

  

BUS572- Blog #2

                                                  Web Analytics and Conversion Optimization

Concept #1 - Log-File Analysis and Page Tagging

Log-file analysis is a very important concept that I took away from chapter 15 because it can provide my team with a lot of in-depth information that will be useful in our Google Marketing Campaign. Log-file analysis is basically an analysis of log records. This information can be used to show how often a potential consumer visits a certain site and it records all clicks that take place on the server. This software can also record where visitors are coming from geographically as well. When log-file analysis is used with internet cookies this software can provide even more in-deph information. Page tagging is the process of tagging web pages with embedded Javascript files. Page tagging will send this information to a third-party server where the statistics can be analyzed.

There are many pros and cons with both of these technologies as well. For example, page tagging can be less accurate than log files because log files record every click, but on the other hand if a browser doesn't support Javascript then no information will be recorded using page tagging. Log files are also in a standard format and can be easily switched between different vendors to analyze historical data, but if you were to use page tagging you might lose valuable information when switching to a different vendor. Log files also record search engine spiders which is extremely useful for search engine optimization and log files also record failed requests, while page tagging only shows successful requests. However, page tagging also has some advantages, such as, the software recording Flash movie interactions whereas log-files cannot. Page tagging can also be utilized by companies that may not operate their own websites. Finally, page tagging providers offer a higher level of support because of third party services. I'm not quite sure which method I would prefer more. At first, I like the idea of log-file analysis because it seems to be a lot more accurate when collecting and utilizing information, but page tagging seems to offer some great services that you cannot get with log-file analysis. However, page tagging can be so complex that it could take weeks or even months to complete and I severely question whether it would be worth it or not to use this type of service. What if you had a deadline to complete a project, like our GOMC project, would you prefer Page Tagging?

Concept #2 - A/B Split Testing 

source:http://www.emailloop.net/images/how_ab_works_diagram_695.jpg

A/B testing measures one variable at a time to determine its effect on an outcome while all of the other elements of the advertisement stay the same. You can create different versions of the variable and test them accordingly. For example, the phrase "buy now" on an advertisment can be moved around to see if there is an increase in sales or not. You can always test more than one version of the variable,  but it will take longer to find results from multiple versions. Next, traffic is then randomly distributed through the new versions and the outcomes are measured for each variable. Once you apply statistics to see which one is the most significant then you will know which advertisement works best and it can then be used in the future. This can be extremely important for digital marketing because you would be able to easily manipulate each part of your campaign or adverisment to see which placements work best. You will also be able to create more conversion rate lifts results. One disadvantage would be that you would have to plan carefully if you were to investigate interaction effects between two islolated elements. I really like the idea of A/B split testing because you are only testing one variable at a time, but would it be more efficient to use Multivariate testing to manipulate many variables at one time? I feel like Multivariate testing would be much more difficult to preform. It seems like you need a large sample of data to have any significant findings, but what if you were only working with a small sample of data? Here is a website that compares and contrasts the two different methods.

Skill- Organization of the AdWords Account

I believe that one of the biggest skill sets I've learned this week is the organization of the AdWords Account. In our first class, we discussed a lot about keywords , but I wasn't quite sure what to do with those keywords once I came up with them. After Sarah's presentation, I had a much clearer vision of how an Adwords campaign is set up and how the campaign functions. I realized that we had only one campaign we needed to run for our client, but I didn't realize that you can have many different Ad Groups. Under these Ad Groups, you can have hundreds of different keywords and the Ad Groups just allows you to organize your thoughts better and put certain keywords under the correct Ad Group. I'm wondering how many Ad Groups should our team have to maximize our return on investment? Should we narrow it down to only three or four Ad Groups or should we expand and make multiple Ad Groups?  This has also really helped with our second team assignment because we were all a little confused on how everything should be organized, but Sarah definitely painted a clear picture that we can all use in moving forward with our client's campaign.

Personal Journey Reflection:

This project is still very new to me, but with the help of Sarah's presentation I believe I have a much better grasp on our mission. I am still struggling with all of the different Google tools, but once I start physically messing around with AdWords I'll be just fine. It has been a struggle to really brainstorm ideas about this project, but I am confident that we will be able to do so soon. I'm really looking forward to the actual running of our campaign and to really see how it will affect our clients business.

Sources:
Stokes, R. (2011). emarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing. (V 1.0 ed.). Quirk Education. Retrieved from http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/19

BUS572 - Blog #1

                         Search Engine Marketing, Pay-Per-Click Advertising, and eMarketing Strategy.

Source: http://dgtizer.com/pay-per-click-advertising/

Concept #1- Pay-Per-Click Advertising 

      One very crucial concept that will be utilized in our Google Online Marketing Challenge is Pay-Per-Click advertising (PPC). This type of advertising system is where advertisers pay only for each click on their advertisements. This type of advertising is keyword based meaning that it is based on a specific search term or phrase that an internet user enters in a search engine, such as, Google or Yahoo. This type of advertising is extremely crucial because it allows advertisers to present their product/offerings to customers who are most likely already in the buying cycle. When selecting key words, the advertisers can use a number of platforms to find key words. For example, if an advertiser wanted to use Google they would use a program called AdWords and could find the following match types: Broad match, Phrase match, Exact match, or Negative match. With this type of advertising, one will need to monitor conversion rates as well as click-through-rates. I believe that this type of advertising is extremely important because every marketing plan is trying to achieve the highest return on investment that they possibly can. This advertising system will allow one to easily monitor and track their results as well as make any changes necessary throughout their marketing period.
       However, there can be many threats to this type of system if not monitored carefully. Click fraud is an example because competitors realize that you must pay for each click so they will deliberately keep clicking on your Pay-Per-Click ad. This article explains how to prevent Click fraud. What do you think is the best way to handle Click Fraud? Bidding wars is another example because high-traffic keywords are expensive and one could quickly burn through their advertising budget. Finally, this type of advertising takes a lot of time to monitor and the larger your campaign gets, the more time one will have to spend monitoring its activity.

Concept #2- The Four P's of Marketing

      The internet is changing our world and how advertisers market to their target population. The four P's developed by McCarthy are now being challenged because new theorists believe that they are outdated. The original four P's stood for products and services, price, placement, and promotion. New smart marketers such as Godin and Mootee believe that Customer-centric marketing is the new way to market to individuals because this type of marketing suggests that we must understand the needs of the customer first and only when we do that will business outcomes be achieved. Seth Godin suggests that there are five elements which should be followed. First, "Data", because the internet makes it much easier for advertisers to mine and gather information. Second, "Stories", everything a customer does and says. Third, "Products", which is the physical manifestation of the story. Forth, "Interactions",  any tactics that allows the marketer to reach out and touch the consumer. Finally, "Connection", this is very important concept because creating a relationship with the customer will allow for repeated use of the good/service in the future. Mootee stated that there are four new P's of Marketing. These are personalization, participation, peer-to-peer communities, and predictive modeling. These new developments are a result of the trend towards the use of the internet, but it is also important to remember that marketers also need an offline strategy as well. Although eMarketing is becoming essential in this technology crazed world, one must have an offline strategy as well so that they can complement each other and allow the organization to take on a holistic view of all objects. What do you think are some best ways to market your business online as well as offline? Should one put more emphasis into an online strategy in today's society?

 Skill- Keywords 

      After our first class, the readings, and speaking with the client, I believe that the most important skill set I've learned about is the use of keywords. A keyword is a word or group of words used by a searcher on a search engine. For example, a keyword could be  "textbooks", "textbook rentals", or "cheap textbooks". A person enters these keywords in a search engine, such as, Google or Yahoo and the search engine will begin to crawl the web looking to find matches to the information that you have just typed in. I believe that this will be crucial for our client because creating unique keywords will not only make internet users more aware of their business, but hopefully, in turn, this will create more traffic to their website, which will ultimately result in more business for our client. However, I find keywords to be incredibly useful, but I also think it will be a challenge to create the correct keywords for our client because their could potentially be thousands of other keywords that we will be competing with in our marketing campaign. I'm still a little confused about negative keywords though. Are you supposed to include them into your Ad Groups or exclude them? I am looking forward to the strategies one uses when creating specific keywords and phrases.

Personal Journey Reflection:
      
      So far we have only had one class and it has been extremely overwhelming with all the assignments we have to do on a weekly basis for this class plus handling all of my other school work as well. I think that we are beginning to clear some issues that we have struggled with thus far. I am also still confused about this GOMC project because we were't given any examples of past projects. Our first class was also overwhelming because of all the different things we had to set up for Google and I don't believe we had enough time to go over everything in class because of all the guest speakers. I am hoping that in tonight's class that we will gain a better understanding of the project and be shown how to use AdWords so that we can get a better idea of the programs that we will be working with.


Stokes, R. (2011). emarketing: The essential guide to digital marketing. (V 1.0 ed.). Quirk Education. Retrieved from http://catalog.flatworldknowledge.com/bookhub/reader/19