Blog 3 - Analytic Tools

There are many different types of advertisement that run on the internet.  Many are visual and have very enticing graphics.  They come in the form of banners, rich media, sponsorships, and videos.  Banners are the most common form of display advertisement; they are static images or flash animations. As they become more interactive, they become rich media and as they become rich media, they become more expensive.  Rich media is a catch all term for banners that a more interactive format. Sponsorships are essentially the ability to buy the rights to sponsor/advertise on a website for a day range at a cost per day.  As YouTube and other video streaming, news sites, music streaming sites become more popular, on-line video advertisement also becomes more popular.  Videos are played before the searched content is show, during the playing of the searched content, or after the content has already played.  Text advertisement is almost completely unique to the Google Display Network.  Pricing for these advertisements is available in many different schemes, including CPM (cost per thousand), CPC (cost per click), and CPA (cost per acquisition). Each of these forms is used at different times depending on the desired goals of the campaign at the time.  I would wonder if the different types of pricing for advertisements could enable a company to gain an edge on marketing over their competitors (particularly the cost per thousand).

Learning about all of the tools that Google has readily available is undoubtedly one of the best resources that both did and did not convert.  Also, a high bounce rate means that the web page is not relevant to the search.  A high bounce rate will cause the standings in Google search results to drop could have been learned in this section.  Knowing that Google Analytics helps to collect data about visitors, when they leave, convert, how they arrive to your site and then how they use the site.  This data can help enable you to tailor your site to achieve conversions based on page views, bounce rate, numbers of visitors, numbers of new visitors and drop off rate.  Google also has an advanced statement feature; an advanced statement is a filter that will allow you to gather data from a specific type of customer.  Google will allow you to mix and match dimensions and characteristics to target specific groups.  It is very important to know why people either did or did not convert and how to modify the ad in the future to ensure more conversions moving forward. 

Google had provided many tools that can be used to create ads and optimize the ads that have been created.  These tools include Ad Scheduling, Conversion Optimizer, and Bid Simulator.  Bid Simulator estimates costs and impressions data over the past 7 days if your company had been running the ad.  It analyzes the auctions data and quality score of data for your company and competitors to estimate where your company would have appeared in the searches.  It leaves everything the same except for the bids that you would have placed, it uses the same values that your competitors had.  Conversion optimizer will place your ad wherever it thinks that it is most likely to get a conversion.  However, to turn this feature on, your company must have had at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days.  Consequently, unless Bridget sets her conversion as a specific action (perhaps visiting contact information page), this would not work for her company as she does not sell anything on-line.  The opportunities tab allows one to pin point ways to maximize a campaign based on goals.  The opportunities tab also allows one to analyze competition.  It will help you to compare your accounts to others who have the same keywords.  It shows which user searches led them to find your page and it will help you to compare your metrics to other competitors in the same sector. Conversion optimizer is a very unique tool, I would like to know what statistics are used to generate the optimal times. 

After reviewing the videos and the chapter assigned for this week, I have been thinking about how we can help BridgetRose Fine Stationery to raise in legitimacy and popularity.  The goal is to help increase the Google Analytics statistics in order to help her company show-up higher in organic search results.  One of the factors is to be able to track the Google Analytics for her company and to be able to make changes to our marketing plan based on the statistics that are available, however one must turn on Google Analytics (which is supposed to be easy).  However, when I Googled her company, it seems that the code that enable Google Analytics were not posted properly; so, now the code is showing up when we search for her company instead of a targeted marketing slogan.  Also, after reading the items that help to optimize the returned search results, Bridget may need to change some of the content on her web site in order to ensure that the key words are repeated in the content.  Her website does seem to have a great deal of links and it should be easy for spiders to crawl through the site and discover each of the pages.  Each of those webpages need to have a description using key words and her headings on those page. The key words should be used as a header and should be bolded throughout.  

Bus572- Blog 2

        

             Web Analytics and conversation optimization is about knowing what data you need before you collect it and then setting up a way to reliably collect and analyze the data.  Consequently, it is necessary to have goals in place when designing the web site in order to be sure to be able to collect the data that is desired.  The web-site’s ability to satiate the set goals will also be indicative of its success.  Key performance indicators and steps are not the same thing.  At each step, it is expected that there will be fewer people that complete the next step.  The Key Performance Indicators may help to show why less people continue on to the next step and by modifying those certain aspects, a greater conversion rate could be obtained.   

After reviewing the assigned readings, there were several key takeaways relating to how businesses are functioning in this day and age.  One of the key points is that businesses are now much more capable of testing ideas.  The internet helps enable this exploration and it also helps to track the data.  This ability to track data and analyze will help lead clues to what paths and set-ups encourage the highest conversion rate.  Also, the software and hardware is accessible for use contributes to the ability to do prototyping and simulations.  Companies often encourage or require their engineers to create multiple renditions of an item before a lot of time and money is spent in an effort to try to perfect an imperfect design.  The same may be said for different ad campaigns, many different versions may be tried using Google’s AdWords, and they may run until there is an obvious lead performer. 

                One of the skills that will be focused on this week is honing the combination and the use of Google’s key word selector.  Considering that we have a very limited budget, for our pay-per-click advertising, and that most of our key words are semi-expensive, we need to be able to find a combination of words or phrases that will be able to sustain more traffic while still being profitable.  It will also be necessary to focus on finding words that would not be included in our search in order to reduce the amount of clicks that are paid for.  This needs to be done because we want to try to reduce the amount of people who click but have no goal of converting.  Also, one of the important things about finding the words for the Ad-Groups is being able to think like your customers do and anticipate the mistakes they will make.  Some of the mistakes they may make is the spelling of a word, an unexpected space, a miss-key, a common slang word. 

                One of the things that will be slightly difficult for me will be knowing and understanding exactly how using the punctuation with searches will influence the results as well as the cost.  I am very much looking forward to spending some more time reviewing Sarah Peduzzi’s presentation as well as hearing from Timothy James.  After brain-storming, our group came up with a large set of AdGroups.  Given the set of ad groups, we will have a great deal of options to choose from.   However, given the price of some of the key words, we will have to be very selective of the groups that we pursue. In order to target the group of people that we feel will be most likely to convert, we will have to specify the time range that our ads will be run.  Also, given that Bridget does not have items for sale on her web site, she will have to provide us with the information of how many people contact her and how many people order items in order to know the conversion rate.  Bridget Rose Fine Stationery’s web page was not designed with the same goals that we are intending to use it for.  We may have to ask her to modify her page, adding more content, in order to receive the desired future results.  

Image is courtesy of: Ad Torque Strategic Services