saying goodbye

Well, It is time to say goodbye to my BUS572 Blog. It has been a wonderful and eye opening experience for me. Being that this was my first attempt at blogging,  I learned LOTS and will take this experience with me to finish out my MBA career.

The GOMC was also a great experience. I learned the importance of being flexible and open minded, particularly due to the many changes with the GOMC challenge this year. (I know you all know what I’m talking about) I am really excited to see the fruits of our labor. My team and I have worked tirelessly on this project to ensure it will be a success for assemble. Our goal is be able to hand this campaign over to them as a well-oiled machine that will only require routine maintenance. We have spoken at length with the assemble folks and they are just as excited as we are to gain exposure within the community and draw in more donations.

So far, we are very pleased with our progress. Please feel free to ask me how the project went, at a later date. Cheers.

Over the last two weeks there has been a lot going on in preparation for the GOMC go live. However I did have some time to learn a thing or two. In the reading by Ghose and Yang I learned that the most profitable keyword ads are the ones generally found in the middle rather than the top or bottom of the page. I find this interesting because some companies spend a lot of money in order to have their ads at the top of a page. This study has reversed that assumption. This can be particularly helpful for us as a class due to our limited budgets.

Also, I learned from the presentation by Emily Gouwens. I had not realized the magnitude of impact keyword advertising has on companies from all different types of industries. She mentioned some major conglomerates that she managed. I assumed that since these companies are so big and spend a tremendous amount of money on offline advertising that online advertising would not be a priority. This information coupled with what I took away from the Ghose and Yang article really opened my eyes to the importance of keyword advertising.

The important skill I learned over the last two weeks mainly revolved around my groups AdWord campaign. I was really able to dive deep into the website analysis provided via Google Analytics. I was able to use Google Analytics to help mold our campaign around the date and time the majority of visitor’s visited the Assemble site. I sincerely hope this information will increase the success of our campaign.

This was an exciting week in the Global Marketing world- the week GOMC goes live! My team and I have put in a lot of effort in preparation and we are anxious to start seeing results.  We put a lot of effort into this campaign it is interesting to know how we will compare to the other students in our class and around the globe. Does anyone know many people (roughly) are taking part in the GOMC this year?  

 

Two weeks ago, Tim James from Google came to present. It was great. He was a very engaging speaker and even though it was towards the end of the class time, he kept me entertained.  MORE ON TIMOTHY JAMES!
He made some great recommendations on AdWords strategy and Google in general. Very interesting to hear some insider information. I particularly like the fact that he has his own AdWords campaign. Walking the walk so to speak.

This week our group really dove into our keyword research. It was interesting to see the vast array of potential key words. We spent hours together and individually coming up with keywords and playing around with the keyword planner. We also spent time searching for our keywords on Google to see what our competitors are doing, and even using some of their ideas to cultivate our own ad campaign. I also learned that the term "summer camp" costs over $15 per click- just a touch outside of our budget :).  We now have a good grasp of our campaign focus.


The Keyword planner is awesome. I spent hours manipulating keywords, evaluating potential costs and benefits, and learning how to navigate the interface. As i mentioned, there are so many different key words and combinations. Keyword planner makes it easy to keep track of your work (it saves it every time you log in!)  It allows you to save thousands of keywords in a spreadsheet and upload it into each individual campaign. 



As a group, i am pleased with our work thus far. Although finding time to get all of this work done is a challenge, as many of my peers would agree. For the next week i hope we can go live with our campaign. We do still have some work to do but i would like to start testing the waters and making adjustments as needed. i am excited, i think that all of this work we have put in thus far will really pay off. 

In this week’s reading, Stoke’s discusses the two main technology approaches for collecting Web analytics data; log-file analysis and page tagging. Log-file analysis software is used to interpret data on a server.  In contrast, page tagging, sends data to a third-party server for data interpretation.  Sometimes, both are used together to analyze a website. The information that is captured can be broken down into three metrics: Count, Ratio, and key performance indicators.

Chapter 15 continues on to explain how and what to test: behavior data, outcomes, and the user experience. Behavior data can be used to indicate intent, outcomes to meet or measure expectations, and experience looking at why users acted the way they did. 

Image taken from this webpage. Click to see!

  There are four ways to further explore the user experience: A/B splitting, Multivariate testing, Listening labs, and single page heat maps. These are used to understand why users behave in a certain way on the website.


The most important skill i learned over the past two weeks was familiarizing myself with the AdWords  tools, particularly with the keyword tools.  There are vast amounts of words and phrases that never occurred to me when formulating the list on my own. However with the help of these tools provided by Goggle i was able to come up with a list of almost 800 keywords and phrases.

I am still finding it difficult to blog. I am somewhat afraid that my blog is public and can be viewed by anyone in the world. It does help to talk about it and ironically i am doing so ON A BLOG! I hope to continue improving my blogging skills. It may help that i am presenting on the topic in 28 minutes.