BUS572-2

Second Two Week Session

These past two weeks I've learned more about Click Through Rate (CTR).  I've always had a concept of what this was, just not a term to go along with it.  But along with that, I wasn't aware that there was a charge to clicking on a link assuming the link was better positioned by higher paying venders for their keyword search results in search engines.  Truthfully, I may have said that all wrong concerning the keywords and search results, but I think the point is made.  Click Through Rate is the ratio of clicks divided by the number of times the link or button was seen (some resources would say served, but seen is the correct terminology according to our text).  For example: if a search for clothing was to render Target as a vender for the particular clothing being searched, it would be considered an impression (a link to Target's site that was seen).  Once the link is clicked, it is considered a "click" and the click ratio is calculated as clicks divided by impressions. This is important because we, the vender, want to know what success we are having with our ads and can be very important in helping evaluate what keywords are and are not working well. What I want to know is what a good rate is.  Will a good rate differ from business to business?  Does a department store have a lower acceptable click through rate compared to a specific hobby or resource website?  When we are working toward helping The Thrifty Wargamer, should I hope for a 1% click through rate or work toward something over 20% depending on the line of business that is conducted?  Because of its specific nature, I would tend to think it should have a higher CTR and we should strive toward that end.

My initial idea of what a conversion is was not exactly what I expected.  A conversion is what happens when a person visits your website and ultimately meets the goal of what you intended the site to do.  For most, this would be to make a purchase or book a flight or perform a transaction of some type.  I simply thought a conversion was clicking on a website link that got you from a search engine to an actual visit to your site.  That's more like a click or an event that moves a person closer to the desired goal.  Getting to the goal is the conversion.  This is important because those who analyze traffic want to know what happened between the time someone saw the link, visited the site, looked at products, and made a purchase.  There may be more steps in that process, but it's all about how the customer was funneled through the events before the conversion happened, or didn't happen.

If a conversion didn't happen, what happened that prevented the potential customer to pull away?  Where did they go?  At what point did they pull away.  Analysis of these events will help to determine how to make the website more effective.  Should conversions hold more weight than CTRs?  Why or why not.  What makes one more important than another if at all?

Although I have not completely understood every aspect of analysis, mainly because there are so many elements of analysis, this is a skill that I've been able to increase over the past couple of weeks.  We've only begun our initial intent of what we'd like to do and proposal of ideas using Google's resources.  However, even in the preliminary stages, I can see where showing our add at certain times of the day for our client will have more of an effect than others. Because gamers "tend" to have a more late night trend to their activity levels, we believe that running adds after 3 PM and before 2 AM will have a greater return on our efforts than running adds at other times of the day.  Analysis will help bring that out once the ads we have are run. We will also need to see what words and phrases will work better than those with which we initially started.

In the next couple of weeks, I look forward to diving more into the analytical side of things. I don't want to just post something or go through the motions of the course.  I'd like to really take what I've learned, use it to the fullest, and alter what we've done. The issue here is that we only have an add campaign outstanding for three weeks.  A longer period would allow us to really look into the how and why of the success of our ad campaign. When we starting working toward wargaming and miniature figures being the focus of the ads, it'll be interesting how it all comes together and what Google's tools will show as a result of our efforts.  I'm really looking forward to the weeks to come. 

REFERENCES

Stokes, Rob. (2013). eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing, v. 1.0.  

     Flat World Knowledge, Inc.