Blog 4

It was interesting to learn about the different types of cookies and their capabilities. Different cookies have different purposes and different expiration times. Some cookies are able to identify unique individual visitors to site and they are able to track their tendencies while surfing the web page.  These are first party cookies, the ability to track unique visitors enables web-sites to count new visitors or returning visitors.  First party cookies are cookies that are unique to that browser and cannot be shared across browsers; furthermore, cookies can only be read by the web site that created them.  Temporary cookies are another type of cookie and expire as soon as a browser is closed. Session identifier cookies have a 30 minute time out length and will time out if a visitor is inactive for 30 minutes.  Cookies are very helpful in customer visitor segmentation, it enables web-sites to pin-point certain demographics and their tendencies. The use of cookies and tracking, while it serves its purpose for the company, I am not sure if I would want a company to have a cache of information on had that it can use to target me for advertisements.  This could be potentially good to target potential terrorists if there are known web-site frequented by known terrorists.

Google uses two main types of targeting on the GDN or Google Display network: content and audience.  The methods of targeting for content are: keyword, topic, placement, and reserve.  Audience targeting includes remarketing and interest targeting.    Different types of targeting are used to fulfil different goals with different budgets.  Topic, placement, and reserve all work to achieve awareness goals, including broad reach impressions at a low cost.  Interest categories align with an audience’s infinities; messages are served to audiences based on their interests.  Remarketing reminds a customer of their started process until they finally come back and convert. Remarketing will serve display ads based on a user’s previous visits.  Topic targeting is where advertisers can target specific topics which best align with their goals and objectives, it is the broadest of content-based targeting types. Google technology reads pages in the display network and categorizes them into over 1,500 topics to enable precise targeting.  Advertisements are then targeted across selected topics to maximize traffic to a broad audience.  There are also over 700 geographical categories including region, country, and city level.  This type of targeting is good for branding campaigns which need to ramp up quickly; however, it is associated with higher cost per conversion and higher conversion rates. While it is fantastic that I am being shown items that I am almost always interested in, I think that I disagree with how targeted it is and how much they know about my thought process. It is funny how when I abandon an on-line shopping session with items still in my basket, a coupon shows up in my e-mail about two days later.

The study by Ghose and Yang examines the relationships between keywords, positions of the advertisements, and landing page quality score.  According to their work, keyword rank has a negative association with click-through rates and conversion rates.  An increase in the landing page quality score is associated with an increase in conversion rates.  Consequently, cost per click is negatively associated with the landing page quality score.  Their work also showed that ads that show up in the middle of the page get the greatest return from their investment, because they are not paying so much that it eat all their profit and they are not paying so far down the page that they do not receive any clicks.  One of the findings of their study disagrees with previous assumptions; it shows a negative relation between conversion rates and rank.  This means that the value per click to advertisers is not uniform across position; the previous assumption was that the value of a click was independent of the advertisement’s position. Their study also indicates that people will make a general un-branded search in order to gain information, they will then search for a branded item, once they know that they plan to buy that item, they will search for the item and try to figure out where they want to buy it from.  

This section of the class was very helpful to piecing different portions of reading together to learn how they interact and help influence marketing decisions.  After listening to the presentations on cookies, it helped to understand how Google uses cookies to observe factors which they include in their page rankings.  They also include this data in their Google analytics in order to identify new customers, this could be very helpful when trying to pinpoint the typical behavior of new customers to their site.  This would also be helpful when identifying where or why customers drop off without converting.  The Google power point showed the different methods of targeting consumers and which methods are best for certain situations and the type of campaign.  Topic targeting is one of the most effective methods for reaching consumers because of the volume that it can reach through impressions.  The volume of consumers that can be reached versus the costs of each impression leads to economies of scale using this method.  The study by Ghose and Yang further highlighted the inter-connectivity between search terms, bid price, consumer tendencies, and web-site design.  The moral of the story is that a lot of money could be spend on advertising, but if the web-site is not well designed including content and ability to convert, more money will be spent on advertising and fewer profits will be realized because more money is being spent on advertising and less profits are being achieved through conversions. 

Image is courtesy of  : http://sweetopia.net/2010/10/how-to-make-a-spider-web-decorated-cookie/