Structuring AdWords Accounts

Creating a well structured campaign through themes and products is crucial in the field of marketing. This is exactly what an AdWords account assists in doing. With an AdWords account, you can do things such as determine which ads are bringing in the best conversions, have control over budgets, as well as manage and edit your campaigns easily. With a well structured campaign, you will also have a better quality score. This score will be generated through a set of ads and keywords that have direct relation towards each other.

There are three primary tips that one should follow while structuring their account. To begin with, one should organize their campaign to mirror his or her website. As I mentioned before, ads and keywords play a vital role in the quality score of a campaign. By creating a campaign to mirror your website, you can also create lists of keywords that directly correspond with texts on the ads as well as ads that directly link a customer to that product's page on the website. A good account structure would follow a similar technique as the visual below. 

It is also important to remember to create separate campaigns  for multi-region advertising. In other words, if you have stores in two different countries, setting up two different campaigns would be the smarter decision. By doing this, each campaign can fully target the separate locations by giving the correct type of  information. Each campaign must be translated into the right language based on the region, as well as specify that your products are available in that country.

Lastly, one should use AdWords editor to manage his or her campaigns. This is a free Google application which efficiently helps make quick changes whether it be removing a keyword or adding ten more. In addition to these quick fixes, this application can also perform advanced searches, sort and view performance statistics, copy or move items between campaigns, and export snapshots to make sharing your account even easier.

Website Optimization

Website optimization has had its share of confusion through the minds of many due to the versatility this concept holds. Optimization is known as an act, process, or methodology of making something as fully perfect, functional or effective as possible. With this being said, you may wonder how website optimization takes place when trying to complete this process. The confusion here comes from the fact that website optimization is made up of many different concepts, not just one. Many people mistake this term being primarly about "Search Engine Optimization (SEO)." In other words, people still believe website optimization means ranking at the top of a search engine. Although this notion still plays an important role, it does not complete web optimization as a whole. 

 

There happen to be many different types of web optimization. These may vary throughout different companies as well as the roles within these companies.  The different types of web optimization consist of:

• Search engine ranking
• User experience
• Lead Conversions
• Customer acquisitions
• Customer Delight 

 Marketers may be more interested in search engine ranking, user experience, and lead conversions while people in sales may care about customer acquisitions. This clearly depicts that website optimization can hold several different meanings based on the company or people within the company. However, If a website does hold all five of these concepts, it is known to be fully optimized based upon the inbound methodology.

Ad Words

Understanding AdWords is known to be quite complex. Although there are many aspects that come together in order to make AdWords possible, I chose to focus mainly on the ad auction for this blog post because that came across as the most interesting to me. This is essentially the starting point to any mainstream search. I have always wondered how which ads are placed where and the process they go through in order to distinguish this. There is a six step process that all ads go through in order to make this possible.

The first step is obviously the search. From this, we move onto the second step which is where the ads are whittled down. For example, If I searched for "coffee shop", The AdWords system would go ahead and search for keywords that most closely match the phrase I am searching. This takes us to the third step in which the AdWords system will narrow down the search by ignoring any ads that are not eligible such as ones that disapproved or target a foreign country. After these three steps are completed, the ads are ordered. This is primarily when the auctioning begins. These ads are based off a formula called "ad rank"which is a combination of bid amount, the quality of your ads and landing page, and the expected impact of any other aspects such as extensions and ad formats.

 After this process is completed, the ads will appear for coffee shops. Although this completes the process, it does not bring it to an end. The auction process is constantly changing with different results all based on the competition there is. With this being said, it is normal for positions on a page to fluctuate.

Week 1 Marketing 348 - Inbound Marketing

Through years of traditional marketing, inbound marketing has made its way to the top of many marketing agencies. As many people recognize, traditional marketing is filled with advertisements (also likely to be called "interruptions.") In opposition to this, inbound marketing promotes companies not with advertisements but other attractive concepts such as blogs, eBooks, webinares, social media marketing, and etc. Traditional marketing, being filled with things such as cold calling, telemarketing, spam, and advertisements, is known as outbound marketing. Inbound marketing has a goal of empowering customers by attracting them to the information they are looking for without interruptions that may divert their attention.

Inbound marketing is strategically formed through something called "The Inbound Methodology." This is a plan in which it is distinguished what must be done in order to gain clients all the way to keeping them. It goes in the order of attract --> convert --> close --> delight. In the convert period of this cycle, potentials customers are turned into leads which initially turn into actual customers during the close period. The delight portion is based on how to keep customers around as well as gain new ones. The goal is to get strangers to visit the website and promote.