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.

Testing Out Search Engine Marketing Tools

This past week of class has been full of amazing speakers and visits. This past Monday, our class welcomed Chris Vella, a search analyst from LunaMetrics, to speak about Google AdWords. He mainly focused his lecture on keywords and characteristics of successful Google ads. First, the title tag should include your main keywords and have a strong indication of what your business is. This can be organized with a "pipe," or a vertical line that separates text. Below the title tag, the meta description should involve keywords, share what the webpage is about, and include either a call-to-action and/or a unique value proposition (UVP). A UVP is best suited for heavy hitter pages, but a call-to-action should be used as frequently as possible. Lastly, when the consumer has clicked on your URL, it should lead them directly to the landing page most closely related to their original keyword. Information on this page should not be overwhelming or contain too many uses of the keyword or else the page will lose credibility. Vella covered this in more depth, but I felt as though these facts were most useful and connected to our client.

On Wednesday, our class took a tour of Google and attended a lecture by Tim James, a partner technology manager. The tour was very entertaining and seemed like an amazing place to work. James' talk centered what the Pittsburgh branch of Google focused on most - shopping. He explained that typically consumers shop online for the least expensive version of a product regardless of company loyalty. This has posed a threat to both brick-and-mortar stores and their store websites. James noted that brand advertising has been extremely successful in combatting this, as it promotes the store rather than a specific product. Advertising on Google includes AdWords, AdWords Express, Youtube Ads, and Shopping Ads (Product Listing Ads and Local Inventory Ads). Although the Pittsburgh branch focuses on the Shopping Ads, James spoke mainly about AdWords. My main takeaways from his talk were to make sure each ad group within a campaign successfully matches a specific product or service and to consistently use Google Analytics to track your ad groups' success.

Although I asked many questions for both speakers, I have some further questions about Adwords and search engine optimization. If my client has various products and services, should I create ad groups for each one even if it routes the potential customer to the same page? Or should I ask my client to divide the products and services up and devote a singular page to each? I am also interested to see how Google Analytics will work with our client's site, as she has very little traffic.

In preparation for the beginning of the Google Online Marketing Challenge, I have attempted to use both Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Screaming Frog. Here is what I thought of each:

Google AdWords Keyword Planner:

This program is known as Google's official keyword aid, in that when an advertiser seeks to find semantically related keywords, he or she searches through Keyword Planner. Planner can successfully help you find other keywords because they have the mind of a computer, rather than a human, and has tracked information related to frequently searched words. When I tried Keywords for the first time, it prompted me to input my budget, my network target audience, my bids, and my text ads to base the suggestions off of. It was a very fluid and easy process, and I look forward to using it for my client.

Screaming Frog:

Screaming Frog is a small desktop program that pulls onsite elements for SEO and presents them on your computer, allowing you to filter for common SEO issues. The data it collects is endless and involves every aspect of search engine optimization. The best part of this is that it crawls in the computer side of digital marketing, including the server-side programming languages, which I am not familiar with. I have downloaded this product to my desktop and am excited to utilize it when I work on my client's advertising.