Reflection on Digital Marketing Course

Today is the final exam for my Digital Marketing course. On Monday, my team presented our final presentation and paper on the results of our Google Online Marketing Challenge. Needless to say, the end of this class has been extremely work intensive and I have not had a moment of reflection on how much I have really learned until now.

Although I didn't realize it when I was in the middle of the work, I understand now how much I have learned and how it has aided me completely in finishing the work. One of the largest lessons I learned was how to properly use Google Analytics and what each of the metrics and dimensions mean. I heavily relied on Google Analytics throughout the course and I realized that without an in-depth understanding of what the metrics meant, I would not have been able to make changes to the campaign and define the ads' successes and failures. Analytics is also extensively intertwined with the other programs necessary to run a campaign. I learned how changes made in AdWords and Webmaster Tools affect the site's Analytics. This opened more opportunities to learn and it is something that I will still expand on.

The second major takeaway from this course was the understanding involved in working with a client and with a group in a semester-long project. There were so many pieces involved in this lesson. First, I had to understand how the client worked, what her expectations were, what her vision was, and what her existing knowledge was. It was also important to note that she was from an older, less technologically savvy generation, and did not have much of a grasp on her website. In addition, she was the main employee of her business and her time dedicated to her site had to be minimal. She, however, was extremely engaged in the process and open to all recommendations because she understood that it was all for the benefit of her company. The other component of this lesson was the understanding involved in group dynamics. In all previous group work I've had, the projects were done internally. The results of this project, however, not only had an impact on my grades but also on the success of the client's company. This brought our group together and made us more dedicated to the goals of the project. Because there were so many moving parts to the project, we had to delegate tasks and make sure they all came together fluidly. This had some trial and error, but in the end, I think everything came together well.

This past semester has taught me so much and I hope to keep learning about digital marketing in my future career.

Experimental Design and AdWords

As the close of my team's AdWords campaign has closed, I would like to reflect on the campaign in the scope of our experimentation. As part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge, one stipulation of the competition was that we had to alter at least one aspect of our campaign within the 17 days the ads ran. We altered many parts of our campaign, including adding new keywords, changing the titles of our ad extensions, and increasing our budget (due to the shortening of our campaign time). The action we took that mostly relates to experimentation, however, was the addition of a third ad.

Our original ad group involved Ad #1 and Ad #2, which both had identical titles and destination URLs. There was only one difference between the ads: Ad #1 had a call-to-action in the second line and Ad #2 had a unique value proposition. After the first few days of monitoring the AdWords account, it became apparent that Ad #1 was preforming much better, at 98% served, than Ad #2, at 2% served. Our group then decided to add Ad #3 to the group, which still had the same title, destination URL, but had the first line meta description from Ad #2 and the call-to-action as the second line meta description from Ad #1. This ad also quickly surpassed Ad #2 in percentage served, and was on trend to be as successful as Ad #1 (I do not have the metrics at this time unfortunately).

This action correlates with this TED-Ed video and two articles given in class, "Finally, A Majority of Executives Embrace Experimentation" and "How to Design Smart Business Experiments." The three resources all shared an underlying theme - the idea that too many businesses implement new features to their business based on "gut feelings," and should instead turn to a "test and learn" mindset. While there are many experimentation methods out there, like prototyping, stimulation, randomized clinical studies, and epidemiological studies, the one that related most to our digital marketing objectives was test groups and A/B testing. The actions taken in our ad campaign represent an A/B test because it tests two live versions of the same ad and is tested on the success of the higher performing version.

In the future, I would like to use this type of experimentation on differing types of digital media. I think this type of live testing in which you can immediately garner data to determine what is performing best is very interesting. In a technologically driven world in which consumers expect the marketer to understand exactly what they would like, this kind of experimenting offers immediate results and is determined by the same customer that you are targeting.