Week 5 (Adwords)---Google Advertising Networks

Where Can You Advertise

In my blog a couple weeks ago, I talked about the different benefits of online advertising and AdWords, but this week I want to a closer look at some of the places that you can advertise. There are two networks that your ads can been shown on with AdWords: the Google Search Network and the Google Display Network. The type of network that you choose will be determined by the campaign type that you have. 

Search Network

Google Search, Maps and Shopping, and hundreds of non-Google search partner websites that show AdWords ads matched to search results are all included in the Search Network. It can help advertisers reach customers actively searching for their specific product or service. It also shows their text ads next to Google search results. 

Display Network

Google websites (such as Google Finance, Blogger, Gmail, and Youtube), partner sites, and mobile sites and apps that show AdWords ads matched to the content on a given page are all a part of the Display Network. It can help advertisers build brand awareness and customer loyalty and increase engagement with customers. It uses appealing ad formats to reach a wide range of customers with broad interests. Advertisers will also be able to choose more specifically where their ads can appear, and to what type of audience.

Week 5 (Social Media)---Campaign Management

Monitoring the Campaign

Facebook ads are very beneficial to expanding your brand or company throughout the social media network. Creating a Facebook ad gives you the opportunity to advertise your site or blog or even a Facebook page. One of the best ways to test this is to make or find a website of your interest, create an ad, and try to run the ad for a while. Once your create this ad you will have to monitor it from time to time to maintain its performance.

Once an ad is reviewed and approved, you can check on the status of your ad by going to https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage. There are various options for you to keep track of with one being "reach" which is the amount of people that have looked at your ad. You can create multiple ads and essentially have them compete against each other to see what content best connects with your audience. These ads can be put under "ad set" and will be organize by each campaign. Monitoring advertisements is an easy way for you to see how many people view your ads, click them, and how much money you spent on that ad.

Week 4 (Adwords)---Measuring and Optimizing Performance

Google Analytics

We all know the saying that "Any type of publicity is good publicity" and whether that's true or not is up to the beholder. On the other hand, it would be good to see how many people look at your site or click through it right? Well that's exactly what Google Analytics does for you. Google Analytics is a free Google product that provides in-depth reporting on how people use your website. It gives you ideas for how to optimize your website by showing you how people found your site and even how they explored it. You can view your entire customer's behavior from they click your ad to seeing what they do on your site by simply linking Google Analytics to your AdWords account. This in turn will tell you how much of your web traffic or sales come from AdWords which will improve your ads and website.

Here are some specific benefits of linking Google Analytics and AdWords:

1. Use your Analytics data to enhance your AdWords experience.
2. Take advantage of enhanced remarketing capabilities. 
3. Import Analytics goals and Ecommerce transactions directly into your AdWords account.
4. Import valuable Analytics metrics-such as bounce rate, percentage of new sessions, and pages/session-into your AdWords account. 
5. Get richer data in the Analytics data to enhance your AdWords experience.

Week 4 (Social Media)---The Power of Facebook

Boosted Posts

Many people do not realize that Facebook can be such a powerful tool that can take your brand or company to new heights. Of course Facebook has its use for social needs. Most people use it to communicate with friends and people all over the world. My Facebook for instance has over 2,000 people as friends (which isn't much considering the amount of people that I have met over the years) and anything that I post on there can be seen by these people. There are many different things that can be done to help your business; however, there is one feature that I want to focus on in particular which is boosting posts. 

From a business perspective, when you share useful and engaging posts, it helps to build relationships with current and future customers that you have. So you may think, "If I can current customers and future customers can see my posts, what about those who have no idea about my company?" That's an interesting question and Facebook answers that with the ability to boost your post for as little as $5 so that more people can see it when they visit Facebook. 

You have the option to reach out to those who like you page, their friends, and even new audiences. This function makes it somewhat like Google ads just from your own Facebook page. This is just another function of Facebook that could potentially help a company expand its brand to new customers on one of the most popular social media sites in this day and age.

Week 2 (Social Media)---Top Skills

Hottest Skills to Get You Hired

We've all reached that point where we're looking for a job and we're wondering, "What does this employer want?" Admit it, it has crossed your mind whether or not the skills that you learned in high school or college will help you earn a career somewhere. Well the good thing is that I have LinkedIn's list of the hottest skills to get you hired and trust me, there are a wide range of skills in favor of tech-savvy people.

These skills vary among job descriptions and will sometimes be in high demand together. Basically, if your skills fit into one or more of these categories, then you either have a job or could've gotten a job last year by recruiters. These were the jobs that were in high demand last year and well into the last couple of months which means that they will probably be hot this year as well. Data has been one of the top 4 skills across every country and is expected to stay that way because the world is becoming more data driven. Skills such as game development, digital and online marketing, and computer graphics have all fallen down the charts a little bit; however, this does not mean that these skills are not wanted. Recruiters are still looking for them just not as much.

Week 3 (Adwords)---Having Structure to Your Campaign?

The Structure of Adwords

When creating campaign, it's important to understand how Adwords works so that you can make an organized account. An organized account leads to effective campaigns which in turn leads to more effective advertising goals. There are three layers that Adwords are organized into: account, campaigns, and ad groups.  

1. Account- This is associated with a unique email address, password, and billing information.
2. Campaigns- Each campaign that you have will have its own settings and budget.
3. Ad groups- Each ad group within a campaign contains keywords that trigger your ads.

Structuring your campaign

When creating your account, you want to focus a separate campaign on each business objective that you have such as driving traffic to your website. If you have different geographical areas that your business serves, then you may want to create a campaign for each one. If you really want to organize yourself, organize your campaigns around the structure of your website. This means highlighting any products or themes that you have. 

Organizing your ad groups

Ad groups will let you organize your campaign into sets of ads and keywords that directly relate to each other. Each campaign will have one or more these groups which can help to boost your ROI. You'll also want to create separate ad groups for each theme or product that is being advertised, which can be similar to your campaign structure. Consider creating ad groups based on sections that appear on your website.

Week 2 (Adwords)---Benefits of Having Adwords?

Advantages of Google Adwords

Having Google Adwords allows you to take advantage of one of the most evolving tools in today's world: online advertising. It allows you to get your ads out to the right people and allows you to get it to them at anytime. There are many different things that Adwords offers; however, here are a couple benefits that are detrimental to any company's success:

1. Target your ads. This means that Adwords allows you to show your ads to people who are interested in them and show them ads that are relevant to what they are looking for. Adwords gives you choices that help you target people more specifically such as keywords, ad location, devices, age, and even the days of the week that your ads appear.
2. Control your costs. This gives you the advantage to control how much money you spend on your ads. You can choose how much that you spend per month, per ad, and per day. There is no minimum on the amount that you can spend which is an advantage because you'll only pay when someone clicks your ad.
3. Measure your success. Perhaps one of the biggest keys is that you are able to track almost anything. If a person clicked your ad you'll know, if they purchased a product you'll know, and even if they downloaded an app...you'll know. Being able to track this information gives you the chance to see where to invest in your campaign so that way you can boost your ROI. You can also learn about your customer's habits such as researching how long they research your product before a purchase. Measuring the success of your efforts helps to determine how much time and money you need to allocate to each tool in Adwords.
4. Manage your campaigns. My Client Center (MCC) is one of the most powerful tools in Adwords that can give you an advantage if you have multiple accounts. This tool allows you to be able to manage multiple accounts from a single location. Adwords Editor, allows you to make changes to your account even if its offline. You can edit you campaign, download your account information and then upload the changes to your online account. This gives you unlimited access to your account whether you have internet access or not.