Week 1 - MKTG 347 - Know Your Audience

Digital marketing in social media is a great tool to get a product, service, event, or anything else out to the public. However, when advertising or promoting a page, it is essential to know who your audience is. What do they like? What do they have in common? How specific or broad should the message be when promoting? I run into these same questions and concerns when promoting my band page on Facebook.

We usually promote our page when we have some new material out or if we are announcing a show. With that, we have two options. We can either promote the page or the direct post. It all comes down to how important the individual post is for us. Another key point is knowing who you want to promote to. What kind of fans can we promote to that would not only like our music but might actually buy our music/merchandise and come to shows? We are a hard rock band, so for us, we want to target actual fans of that style of music. If we chose to promote to fans of a super huge rock band, we may not get the results we want because a lot of people may like a few songs by that band and may not fully like everything they offer. Instead, we target other bands fans who have a tighter following. That way, we get to the more hardcore fan of that genre.

Band Page Layout

Week 16 - MKTG 349 - Adding Phone Numbers To An Ad

First off, what are the benefits of adding a phone number to an advertisement for consumers? Well, it encourages customers to directly call your business to speak with a representative. It is even more beneficial for individuals using a smartphone, as they can simply click the call button on the ad and their device will dial the desired number. For a business, there are even more benefits for adding a phone number. It makes it easy for the customer to contact a business. Each click on a call-only ad exclusively drive calls to the business. With adding a phone number, advertisers can also choose when they want the phone number to appear so that customers do not call when the business is closed.

Adding phone numbers to ads can bring in traveling customers. People who are touring normally do not know the phone numbers of businesses, so adding a number can increase business. If a tourists is looking for a specific style of restaurant, they can input the desired quality into their computer or phone. From there, if they click the ad, they can view the website directly. If there is a phone number on the ad, they can easily call the restaurant to ask about pricing or to even make a reservation if they are using a mobile device. Overall, both parties benefit from adding phone numbers to ads, and call extensions typically increase the clickthrough rate by 4-5%.

Week 15 - MKTG 349 - Shopping Campaigns

Before you select what campaign you want to use, you need to think of what your goals are. There are several types of campaigns that include: search network with display select, search network only, display network only, shopping, and video. If you are a retailer, you may want to consider shopping campaigns. Traditional ads are just text based which try to make possible customers click on the ad. With a shopping ad, you can promote more than just a click, you can engage and show the consumer what you have to offer. The shopping ad can show a photo of the product, the title of the product, its price, store name, and more. This type of ad is strong because it gives consumers a sense of the product before they even click on the ad.

Benefits include:

More traffic: business see higher clickthrough rates with Shopping ads. This is due to the ad being more descriptive than a traditional text ad.

Better qualified leads: shoppers will click on this ad if they are truly interested in the product. It is like window shopping, consumers know what they are getting into before they are redirected to another page.

In addition, Shopping ads can appear on Google Shopping, Google Search, and partner websites such as YouTube and Image Search.

Week 9 - MKTG - Overview of Search Advertising

Google alone sees over 100 billion searches each month. Why? Because when people want or need something, it is becoming an instinct to turn to search engines. People search when they want to know something, when they want to go somewhere, when they want to do something, and more. every search represents an opportunity for marketers looking to influence the decisions of the consumer. This type of advertising uses a pay-per-click format in which advertisers pay for each user that clicks on their ad. You can also bid on keywords that relate to what you are offering to get a better ad position.

If you want to be successful with you ads, you need to conduct some type of research so you know who your target market is and what they are searching. Knowing what the consumer wants and how they go about searching for it is huge in terms of getting your brand out there. Some of my older posts go into more detail about this, but this is an overview to get ready to take the Search Advertising exam for Google Adwords.

Week 8 - MKGT 349 - AdWords Fundamentals Exam Tips

So you are having trouble passing the Fundamentals exam for AdWords. Don't worry, you are not alone. Personally, it took me 3 attempts to pass it. Well, my first attempt I took it without studying or having any background with working in AdWords so I wouldn't really count that. But in all honesty, it is going to take time to study for the exam. It will not be uncommon for you to study at least 8 hours a week in preparation for the exam. For me, a big help was to actually work with AdWords through a Google Grant at my school, I am more of a hands on learner so that experience and background really helped me with the certification. If you cannot get access to this, the exam study guides will do fine. You just have to be prepared with reading the same components over and over again. There are some good videos out there that I have linked in one of my older blogs that can help, but you are going to want to read through the following study guides:

• Introduction to AdWords
• Campaign Management
• Measurement and Optimization
• AdWords Fundamentals PDF Download-Help With Offline Studying

Another tip I have for you is to take the test multiple times, the more you are familiar with the questions, the more you know what you need to study. If you always seem to struggle with certain questions, you can go to the study guides and individually pick out what you need to study. 

Week 7 - MKTG 349 - Campaign Optimization

So you created a campaign for your website using Google AdWords and you notice that the campaign is not meeting your expectations. What do you do now? You may have to make some minor changes that can boost your campaign in a big way. This is known as optimization. The first step is to use a landing page that best represents your ad. Your ad should display or explain to the customer exactly what your webpage contains. If a customer finds that your webpage does not contain exactly what your ad shows or states, then they are more likely to leave your site. This may not only loose you that customer, but possibly future customers if they recommend to others to not use your website. If an ad states that you are offering a discount or sale, then your landing page should demonstrate that promotion.

For an example, let's search "baseball bats" and see if an ad effectively demonstrates what a customer will find on the landing page.

Ad

Landing Page (click to view)

Looking at the ad, we see some keywords that we expect to find in the webpage. These include: "free shipping," "free returns," "24/7 customer service."  Now notice the first thing a customer will see at the top of the page is that there is free shipping everyday. For many customers, free shipping is going to catch their attention and give them a good reason to do business with this company. In to top right, there is a link for returns for customers that already bought a product but need to send it back. Customer service is a big deal for many consumers, and in several areas on the landing page, there are different ways for which a customer can contact the company with any questions or issues. On many websites, a customer may have to go through several pages to find this information. For them to have all of this on their landing page makes them seem like a company someone would want to do business with.

Week 6 - MKTG 349 - Ad Performance Update

It all starts with keywords. I ended up deleting keywords that were not performing well just to clean up my ad group a bit. I saw an increase in clicks over the week, netting around a 20% increase in clicks overall. However, I still am not fully satisfied with this, so I need to find another way to increase my traffic. What I chose to do was to make another ad. I can collectively use information from both ads to figure out what is actually working. I chose to create an ad for a different tiger because I did not want my ads to compete against one another. All of these actions are intended to further my knowledge with Google AdWords and how to optimize a campaign.

New Ad

For this ad, the only keywords I used were the ones that were getting results. This way, I can easily compare not only the keywords, but the ad itself. People may be more likely click on an ad that speaks to them, meaning that if what the ad says satisfies what they are looking for or interested in, then they would be more likely to click on it. In just two days and on a tight budget, the new ad has already been clicked on six times. It has netted more clicks than my original ad in that same time frame.