Course Reflections

            As we come to the end of this course, it comes time to reflect on what we learned this semester in preparation for final exams. I learned a lot about the use of Google AdWords and the different strategies that can be applied to online marketing. I also learned what not to do and that there is a lot more to online marketing than I first thought.

            One of the biggest things I learned this semester was how to use Google AdWords. Knowing how to set up an advertisement and allocate budget money properly is essential when working for a digital marketing company or industry. Knowing how to use Google AdWords may help me to get a job or internship in the future.

Knowing how to use Google AdWords is beneficial, but only if one knows what the metrics and dimensions mean. I now know what a click-through rate is, what an impression is, and what clicks mean in the realm of digital marketing. If I didn’t know what these things meant, knowing how to use Google AdWords would be practically useless.  The courses we took through Google were very beneficial to learning about how to use Google Analytics and what the metrics and dimensions actually meant.

Thank you for reading this semester, and have a great summer!

Google Webmaster Tools

It's been crazy lately! Hockey season ended, I went on spring break (home and San Francisco) and then went to the American Marketing Association International Collegiate Conference in New Orleans! Because marketing is entering the Golden Age of technological advancement, I’m going to talk about Google Webmaster Tools and how they will be useful for our client’s digital marketing efforts in the future.

Google Webmaster Tools can be very helpful when running a website. Image from: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-webmaster-tools-now-tracks-indexed-urls-specific-sections-website-including-https/96749/

To start using Google Webmaster Tools, one first has to sign up and verify the account. There are four ways to verify that the account is really you: by uploading a file to your server, adding a meta tag to your HTML, adding a new DNS record, or by using your Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager account. There are a lot of different things that can be helpful with the webmaster tools. Once you have signed up you will have access to your site’s traffic referral sources, like pages that link to yours, and your internal links. You will also be able to see what search queries match with your site, and which search queries people will be searching for when they see your site come up in the results. For our client’s digital marketing efforts, I would say that using Google Webmaster Tools would be a great choice.

A very important part of making sure your site is working properly and that your users computers and information are not being compromised by hackers and malware, and the Google Webmaster Tools help you to track anything that could be malicious on your site. In addition, you must update your software regularly, so sign up for any mailing list that your website management tools utilizes to make security announcements so that you know when there is new software available or a new bug to watch out for. It is also possible to set up Google Alerts to notify you when there is a spam-related keyword detected on your site. There are also user-generated spam issues that can come about from forum posts and comments on content by users. We’ve all seen the annoying social media comments and tweets from spammers where there are twenty in a row with a link and some eye-popping caption or title. Users may be inclined to click on these spam comments and be sent to a harmful or undesirable web page. The easy way to get around this is to create a spam policy to protect your site from these spammers. It would be good for our client (who’s site is an online gift registry in which you can categorize and make your own items with links to product pages, or any page really) to make sure that a good spam policy is in place for all wish list products. It would be very easy for anybody to link to a malicious site through the product pages.

There is also information on how to improve your site’s HTML and you can get suggestions on how to do this, as well as how to removed a page or site from Google Search results if you do not wish for it to show up on a search results page because it is under construction or old. You can also submit a sitemap to help search engines with their crawling and categorizing. I would suggest that our client would submit a sitemap so that Google could easier crawl and categorize the website.

Keyword Planning

For our fourth individual assignment, we were given four search engine optimization tools to explore, and are required to discuss two. This is not the area that I am really interested in, or good at. I find all of these things quite confusing, hopefully writing it out helps me understand. 

The tools we were asked to explore are all tools that one can use for search engine optimization, and are mainly for keyword planning and site mapping. I am only going to discuss a couple of the tools, for the sake of not repeating myself.

I learned a little bit more about the Google Keyword Planner that comes with AdWords, and took a look at how AdWords actually works. This will be especially helpful for the Google Online Marketing Challenge we will begin competing in next month. AdWords Keyword Planner takes your keywords and tells you how many advertisers are using that keyword, and the probability of your advertisement/page ranking high enough to make an impression. AdWords also asks for your daily budget (how much will you spend in a day on advertisements?) and tells you how many impressions and clicks you can expect to have in a day. With a budget of $1.00 a day, one could have over 103 impressions, and more than 11 clicks. Before this week, I was confused as to what the difference between an impression and a click was, and I'm sure if one is not familiar with online marketing - it should be explained: an impression is when a person sees and reads the advertisement (aka, it shows up on somebody's Google Search results page when they search for a keyword you have designated as relevant), a click is when somebody physically clicks on the advertisement and goes to explore the web page. The Google Keyword Planner does take in to account that AdWords makes Google money, and tends to choose the keywords that will benefit Google the most. To find other keywords there are a couple of other tools (the ones I was given the option to explore):
Moz.com: SEO Software, Tools, and Resources for Better Marketing
Uber Suggest: keyword brainstorming/suggestion tool

The other most interesting and important tool I explored was Screaming Frog, which is a desktop program that "spiders" all of a websites' elements in a way that is easy to use for search engine optimization. Screaming Frog organizes all of the material and makes it easy to look through and analyze every page, link, image, URL, script, CSS, and app. This tool is especially helpful for finding duplicate pages on a medium or large site with lots of pages, as duplicate pages can detriment a page's search engine ranking (this, I did not know!). Screaming Frog also allows one to export the information to Excel, so as to have a form of the information that can be shared with others. This could help my team immensely with search engine optimization, because the our client's website is complex and well developed already.

The most important thing I have learned from this assignment is what to do with AdWords, how to use AdWords better, and how to find the keywords that will work the best to search engine optimize our client's website (and my blog).

Of course it is a good thing to have great keywords, and use them to have your site rank better in Google's index, but don't forget that there are consequences for overloading your site with keywords. "Keyword stuffing" as it is called, is a black-hat marketing technique, will have your page marked as spam and earn you a lower ranking in Google's index (quick recap: black-hat techniques are the techniques that are not approved or seen as cheating the system by the search engine). Before I go, here's a funny for this short reminder about keyword stuffing:

Who likes turkey without gravy anyways? Image from: https://www.seo.com/blog/keyword-stuffing/

Is working at Google really like the movie, "The Internship"?

So much has happened in the last week, I will have to flood this blog with posts tonight! I have another post due before class tomorrow, and I am planning to write another about the guest speaker we had in one of my other classes - I am super excited about that one too! Hopefully there will be time to write everything tonight, in between studying for a Spanish exam. This post is also really long because I love the Google office and really, really would like to work there... gotta get my internship in order. Sorry in advance! But seriously, if you ever have the chance to visit a Google office, go. The Pittsburgh office is apparently considered relatively conservative compared to the rest, but awesome nonetheless.

Perhaps you have seen the movie, "The Internship"; where two best friends in their late 30's/early 40's or so get an internship at the Google headquarters, and realize how awesome it would be to work at Google - three meals a day provided, snacks, you can work wherever you want as long as you get your stuff done, a really cool office with all kinds of themes and innovations. I can now confirm with you, that "Yes. The Google offices are that cool."
Yesterday, our Digital Marketing class had a field trip to the Google Pittsburgh office in Bakery Square, where we were joined by the clients we will be working with and a few guests from Chatham. The closer we got to getting inside the building, the more excited I got. I was really excited - I had heard good things, and I had seen "The Internship". I was hoping it would be like the headquarters in California that were used to film the movie. We gathered in the main lobby and took the elevator up to the seventh floor, where we were given visitor tags and briefed on the security protocols (unfortunately for everyone, photos are not allowed). The first thing one sees when walking in to the offices is a games room (what a great start, right?) and micro kitchen. The Pittsburgh headquarters has quite a few micro kitchens, two cafeterias, office space for 300 people, and much more spread out over four floors of the Bakery Square office building.
The building is very unique and each floor is themed: there is a Kennywood themed floor, a tunnel and outdoor areas of Pittsburgh themed floor, and a Nabisco themed floor (the building was once a Nabisco factory). Nabisco is the company that makes Triscuit crackers, Ritz crackers, etc. and each room on the Nabisco floor is named after a Nabisco product, each room of the Kennywood floor is named after a ride at Kennywood, and the Pittsburgh floor had rooms named after parks, tunnels, and landmarks in Pittsburgh. One of the best features of the whole tour was the cargo net lounge, which is a cargo net suspended above some of the office space, with pillows. When we went by, there were Google employees seated comfortably in the net with laptops propped up on pillows, working. That's the beauty of Google - you can work anywhere in the building and make your own day as long as you get your work done. We were walking past the language support office space and were pleasantly surprised to see an adorable French Bulldog wagging her tail at us a we passed. You can also bring your dog to work as long as you have proven that they are a safe animal to have around. The cafeteria has a hydroponic spice garden, an outdoor summer garden and beehive, and a heated chicken coop outside with laying hens. Not only is Google innovative, they are trying to be more friendly to the earth, and promoting healthy diets among their employees. The micro kitchens were filled with healthy snacks like dried fruits and açai berries, fresh fruit, and various healthy snacks. The kitchens have feature chefs every once in a while, and serve a delicious spread which we unfortunately were too late in the afternoon to experience.
After our tour, we attended a private presentation on Search Engine Optimization, and were able to network and have a question and answer session with experts at Google. My questions about link farming were answered and I got to find out for myself what Google is really like. The visit to Google gave me hope that I can someday have an office job (I am not the type of person that easily sits still and does the same thing all day, in the same cubicle, with the same people, every day) and that I would like it.