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