Week 7 (AdWords)---Website Traffic

Measuring website traffic

In order to drive more traffic to your website, you must focus your advertising goal on increasing your clicks and clickthrough rate. There are three main things you want to measure to help you track and improve a campaign focused non traffic:

1. Clicks and clickthrough rate: This can be used to see how close your ad matches your keywords and other targeting settings. These two can also be used to help you identify how many people found your ad appealing enough to actually click on it and visit your website.
2. Keywords: Keywords is a term that is prevalent in almost every aspect of digital marketing. There are three strategies that you want to use to monitor your keyword performance with:
1. Continuously pause or remove words that aren't working well for you ad and try some new ones. Columns and segments help to review your keywords' clicks, CTR, Quality Score, and more.
2. Using keyword matches types will help you control who sees your ads. Certain match types will get you more ad impressions, conversions, and clicks.\
3. Run a keyword diagnosis to get more information about your keywords' Quality Scores and whether they're triggering your ads.
3. Search terms: Use this report to review the list of searches that triggered your ad, and identify the relevant terms that are driving traffic to your website and add them as new keywords. You may also want to add terms that are irrelevant to your business as negative keywords so they won't trigger your ads.

Week 6 (Adwords)---Reaching your Audience

Reaching Different Groups of People

When trying to reach your specific audience, Google helps you target your ads in these four ways:

1. Audiences: One of the bonuses you have is the ability to choose the audience that best matches your customers. Affinity audiences help drive brand awareness by reaching TV-like audiences on a broad scale. Adding custom affinity audiences can help you reach as many potential customers as possible with an affinity for a specific product area. To reach specific audiences actively shopping for a product or service you may use in-market audiences. 
2. Interest categories: Want to reach people interested in products and services similar to those you business offers? Then use interest categories! You can show your ad to people who demonstrated specific interests, regardless of whether your ad correlates with the particular topic of the page or app they're currently on.
3. Remarketing: With remarketing, you can reach people who have previously visited your website while they visit other sites on the Display Network.
4. Demographics: One of the most common categories in any targeting tool that allows you to reach people who are likely to be within the age, gender, and parental status demographic group that you choose. 
5. 

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 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 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.