End of Lesson 10

         This week we worked on page optimization and other key statistics to get our pages more traffic. I noticed a significant differences when I gave a sneak-peak to my friends and family on my social networking site. They offered some great suggestions and gave some much needed encouragement. If I get to produce a page for Sandy and Twice as Nice, I'll hopefully be able to get her some more informed contacts and (again hopefully) more regular customers. My goal is to get her daily profit up by 20% - which is $25 a day. That probably equals one or two more sales per day.

        We also talked about SEO's. I listed a few things I would be able to do for my site that would make it more "searchable". Most of it has to do with the most clicked words on Google.

1. Get in touch with my customers and know their needs better. I'll know how to reach them if I know what more of them want. 

2. Use different tag words.

3. Test different ads - see which wording attracts more customers.

4. Use keywords or phrases in my ad title or title on my page

5. Use keywords in specific wording on my pages (in the text)

ROI & Conversion Tracking

         This week I learned about how to interpret and improve the numbers that Google Analytics and tracking information gives me about my site. I've had about 84 people come to my site through my campaign. I need to add some more words that will get the right people to my site. Also, I'll need to pause it to make some minor adjustments, but I am pretty happy about being positioned 4.3 on searches.

        I'm going to put my site up on my personal Facebook page next week and see how that affects things too. I know that lots of people will either help me out with suggestions, or at least go look at the page. Getting in contact with my drop shipper is easy, but it look like it would take forever to actually ship product - so I don't know if I'll be making any sales during this semester.

        I also figured out that as proud as I am about my website, there is a reason why some people do this for a living. The creative part is the worst. I know how I want to see things run, but I don't have that knowledge or skill set yet. More than likely I'll need to learn how to code, or at least get better at designing a webpage.

Lesson 8

Relevance and Quality Score
         We learned about Google analytics and how they help us understand our customers and potential customers traffic. We learn what links they go to, how long they stay, and what our turnaround is for the ad campaigns that we made last week. Learning about relevance; we want whatever is in our ad campaigns to be what people are searching for so that our product or service is the best match for their search. This hopefully leads to better sales or higher customer awareness.
         As a class we tried to help each other with the best key words to use in our campaigns and how the right words can increase traffic. It was interesting to note that worked for me was being generic, but my click through rate was really high, so I need to be more specific. Other students, on the other hand, were very specific and it was difficult for their ads to gain any sort of momentum.

Ads and Ad Groups

Week #7

I came up with a Google Ad campaign this week:

shoes, Shoes, SHOES!
Size 4 - Size 12
A new place for you to drool
www.shoecomplex.com

I was given the suggestion, multiple times, to include something about having a sale or up my prices ridiculously high and claim some obnoxious percentage off. While I understand their points about attracting large volumes of customers, I don't necessarily want to attract large amounts of people and then get no sales and little margins on the sales I do get.

Just being another shoe website - I've got nothing unique and a swarm of competition, so that's why everyone is competing over price. Seeing as how this is my first webpage, I'm keeping my expectations pretty low. If I can get my money back for my business application fee, I'll consider myself fortunate.

One thing that I had to adjust was my idea about donating to a charity of choice. I initially wanted each purchase to have a "round up" (to the nearest dollar) button so that each purchase could donate change to a charity of choice. I wasn't able to find the code for that - so instead I told everyone on the homepage that 20% of their purchase is going to charity, and if they emailed me their charity of choice, 10% of that 20% would go to a foundation they were fond of.