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

  

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