Bigger Buy Button

Iteration 3 Individual Contribution

My individual contribution to Iteration 3 was as follows: Responsible for the communication between our group and non-profit organization (such as meetings, and emails), created Mission Trip campaign (which grouped decided to pause), and keywords that focus on volunteer's for Christian Mission Trips.

My landing pages for Iteration 3 are as follows:

Christian Mission Trips/Students

Christian Mission Trips

Christian Mission Trips

Summing It Up

IS 379 is nearing a close, which also means so is my adventure with the EMU Google courses.  I feel very lucky to be apart of a one-of-a-kind curriculum which gave such great real world experience.

These two courses helped me not only develop new skills such as web design, but also brought out creativity in making Adwords Ad's and content on my pages.

I learned that Google is great for Adwords customers if they can develop their site around the ad's.  CNBC showed me that many people share their deepest secrets with the search box and are usually right to the point. 

If your selling something, the landing page can be more powerful than a brick and mortar store.  Take where I work (ACO Hardware).  A customer comes into the store most likely looking for something specific but has distractions to reach the exact location of the product.  The customer looks up and sees aisle signs for Paint, Housewares, Tools, Automotive, Hardware and much more.  In some cases the customer will get distracted and will look in housewares and forget about their original intention.  

So where am I going with this?

In Adwords we're able to read the searchers mind via the keywords they type into that search box (say it's Benjamin Moore Paint).  We then build an Ad tailoring to Benjamin Moore Paint and the customer clicks and is directed to our landing page. 

This class showed that we primed the visitor to do something.  In this case the visitor is in the market for Ben Moore and that is what we need to offer.  The landing page then should tailor to Benjamin Moore paint with pictures and a button saying "Find the nearest Ben Moore ACO Location".  There should not be excessive navigation or anything to distract the customer from zoning in on his/her goal.

Remember the brick and mortar customer?  They may go into the store knowing what they want, but they might not admit it to the associates like they could to the search box. The customer will be distracted by all the aisles of Tools, Hardware, etc... just like they could on your page with sidebar navigation, spilling them out of the funnel.

The web allows users to find exactly what they're looking for. This semester, all of us showed we could give it to them better than what was in place.

Thank you Bud, for all the lessons you've taught us for the past two semesters. I think I've grasped a concept.

-Cam

Individual Contribution for Iteration 3

I added some future recommendations to the slides of Iteration 3. From the discussion in our previous class I was of the opinion that CAHS should tweak their ads itself because the ads do not say anything about coming to the CAHS instead they emphasize more on the online photo gallery. They can use their photo calendar for 2010 as a powerful medium to attract people to their sites. They should find their niche customers and appeal accordingly.

Although our mates did follow Web Design For ROI and Dont make me think and our individual analysis to help more traffic inflow into the get directions link, their efforts did not bear quantum leaps in visits. It is commendable that they increased the traffic to the directions link. The fault lies in the ads as well. Chris in the class suggested ads like "Come Pick me up". There should be such ads suggesting driving down to the shelter and not just "Browse our cute Photographs"

Google Real Time Search

Google has described enhancements to the technology of the search process that include voice, images, video, blog posts, and on-the-fly translations.  They are adding a feature that makes the search process so up to date, that something posted seconds ago would show up in the organic results.  The image aspect would allow a cell phone camera to take a photo of a building, and search for the building name.

CSS and Landing Page Consistent with Website

It seems a bit of irony that we pursue CSS for landing pages, but we did not pick up on the idea of consistency between our landing pages and the NPO websites.  If there is a hokey-looking connection, a search might be totally abandoned. Our conversion rates might not change much, but the NPO should experience legitimate gains from a conversion that decides to stay with their website.  

Multiple Audiences, Multiple Agendas

This is along the same line of thinking as the last post, Fork in the Road.  Except, after thinking about the earlier presentations in class, it is probably more appropriate to describe some AdWords campaigns as serving multiple audiences.  This will demand some separate efforts, because the goals will not likely be the same.  And, it is the goals that determine the approach.  

Search "A" is for bananas, and search "B" is for paper clips. There is no way that the two terms are related.  There must be a different and separate handling of each search with each having its own landing page.  Search "A" is targeting monkeys.  Search "B" is targeting office managers.  In this particular case, different audiences require separate campaigns or AdGroups.

Landing page

We learned that our landing page should reflect our ad group that is most successful, and should address the need that our targeted group is seeking. It should also be attractive and not be too text heavy.

Missed class

The one class i missed was one of the worst classes to miss. It was ther class where we verify our html pages, so i will be taking this week to read the book, and make sure i have a better understanding of how to verify.

Fork in the Road

There are many analogies and conceptual descriptions to describe AdWords opportunities.  One such useful phrase may be the "fork in the road."  Keywords and landing pages work well when they relate to each other and demonstrate "relevance."  The successful search process puts the results on page one.  If another keyword is different or unrelated to the first one, it may be wise to consider a second landing page that can be designed to "fit" the relevance requirements.  This is the "fork in the road" in the AdWords campaign, and represents another path or direction to pursue to achieve a different set of relevance.

typepad

I have never been a big blogger, but doing this for class has given me a interest in it. I liked posting on my experiences and reading others experiences. Even though i should have posted more daily. I noticed you can blog on facebook and twitter through here, very cool.