Stay Creative

Calvin: You can't just turn creativity on like a faucet.  You have to be in the right mood.

Hobbes: What mood is that?

Calvin: Last-minute panic.

"The world is a better place with Kanye West on Twitter."

Pitchfork has a fun take on Kanye West's recent exploration into Twitter.  At the time of this post, Mr. West's Twitter account is roughly 48 hours old, has nearly 300,000 followers, and already created one trending topic.  The stat I find most interesting (or egotistical) is that he's following exactly zero (0) people.  Only Kanye would have 300,000 followers and an empty feed.  It's lonely at the top.

Advertising to the 14-35 demographic

Al McWilliams from Quack! Media discussing "gas" and "HJ's."

I attended Al McWilliams talk at LA2M.  He spoke about marketing to the 14-35 demographic.  I enjoyed this talk party because this demographic includes myself.  It's interesting to see how companies try to target me and my peers.

I enjoyed his specific examples.  If you're advertising razors, should you include David Beckham in an ad?  Or would your ROI be maximized better by including some guarantee?

While his company, Quack! Media, is targeting the "young and hip," they still do this by using more traditional forms of marketing (as opposed to digital).  Their website says it all: "We don't do web, ever."

Improve Web Data Analysis

My father loves quoting Yogi Berra.  One of his favorites is, "If you don't know where you're going, you may end up somewhere else."  He often started presentations to clients with this.  It speaks to the importance of having a plan.

The same lesson can be learned in reporting data.  Your client often will not have the level of expertise in looking over the data that you generate (that's why they hired you).  Presenting it to them in a simple and understandable way is key.  If you don't have a plan of analysis and presentation, who knows what your client will take away?

This article gives many good tips on how to take web data and effectively present it.

The 7 Secrets of Running a Wildly Popular Blog

A very good post on improving your blog. Personality, conversation, and likeability are key.

United Way Week 10

This week:

• Focus on optimizing "Food" adgroup.
• After gaining Analytics access, integrate it with 2-1-1 to fix "zip code backdoor."

Autism Society Week 10

This week:

• Boardmaker adgroup continues to perform well for a low volume adgroup.
• Broad match modifiers drastically improve higher volume adgroups.
• Landing page optimization begins next week.

Broad match modifier affecting original keyword

After experimenting with broad match modifiers, I noticed something strange about the performance of the traditional broad match keyword.  During the month of June, "autism symptoms" was getting a large number of clicks and had a CTR of almost 10%.  The modified broad match keyword "autism +symptoms" was added at the beginning of July.

As of today, July 23rd, the new keyword is performing extremely well.  CTR increased by 5% by using a modified broad match.  What I'm curious about is the performance of "autism symptoms" in the month of July.  Its CTR is below 1% even though it is getting some impressions.  If the impressions went down, I would still expect the CTR to remain somewhat constant.

My questions is is this a consequence of using broad match modifiers?  Is it a best practice to pause the traditional broad match equivalent of a BMM?  As you can see, I have paused the low performing keyword.

In Person Networking - Marketing Consultant

Last week I met with a local Marketing Consultant.  He is currently putting together a business plan for a startup.  It sounds very interesting and should do well in the Ann Arbor area.  I am also in the process of starting a business with a few partners.  I enjoyed sharing ideas and what we've learned.

After having a good discussion we decided to meet again with the rest of my business partners to further discuss a possible working relationship.  He liked what our company had to offer and is planning on recommending our services and or outsourcing some work.

The most helpful part of the conversation was him helping us answer objections or concerns that his clients would have.  He sees the value in our services and is convinced that we can help some of his clients.  He wanted to see how we would answer their objections.

It was good experience to address possible concerns clients would have.  We now have a very well thought out pitch and good responses to the most common objections.

Google Reporting and Analysis Advanced Exam Experience

Today I passed Google's Reporting and Analysis Advanced exam.  Having also passed the Fundamentals exam with a 92%, I feel success on these tests depends on two things:

Studying
For both exams I studied the materials provided by Google.  While helpful, it makes for a boring read.  The e-learnings spread throughout the reading material gives a good summary of the concepts that the reading is trying to convey.  Read the material for specific details and review the e-learnings for a conceptual understanding.  Both are needed when taking the exams.  Some questions test your applied knowledge while others are a test of your memory.

Experience
While I have been using Google Analytics for a good amount of time, I am more experienced with Adwords.  I have only used Analytics for one non-profit and a financial firm.  This real-world experience helped me immensely.  My almost two years working with Adwords gave me a deeper understanding.  I was able to reason through a lot of the questions that I didn't immediately know the answer for.

The Reporting and Analysis exam does cover a lot of optimization techniques that one should already know if they have taken the Fundamentals exam.  This made part of the exam a review of sorts.  The questions that related more to Analytics were tricky, more "techie," and a little more based on memorization of the reading material.

You can do it!
I feel that anyone who studies the material well can pass the exams.  To earn a higher percentage, true understanding of the material would seem to come with hands on experience.

Overall, I feel passing the exams represents a good understanding of the material.  If I was looking to fill an Analytics or Adwords position, I would feel confident hiring someone who passed the exams (slight self-promotion... email me for my resume).

Autism Society Iteration 2

United Way Iteration 2

I should be making $49,740

OkTrends is the official blog of OkCupid, the best dating site on earth. Compiling our observations and statistics from the hundreds of millions of user interactions we've logged, we use this outlet to explore the data side of the online dating world.

OkTrends is one of my favorite sites to visit.  Not because of its relation to dating site OkCupid, but because of the data they interpret and display in simple, elegant, and relevant ways.  They take data generated from over 1.5 million users to find trends.  The results tell a lot about how people interact and how they feel about themselves.

According to the above calculator, I should be making almost 50k a year.  Thought I'm not sure if this is before or after taxes.  This recent post shows the variation of the national average compared to OkCupid's of attributes users enter into their profile.  For instance, men on OkCupid are 2" taller (according to profiles).

BPGLobalPR: "Well that wasn't so hard."

Vintage Ads

Fox News has a gallery of 41 vintage ads.  Here are a few of my favorites.

It's Okay to Stare

It's Okay to Stare

Imagine stopping in the middle of a busy work day, kicking up your feet on your desk, sitting back, arms cradling the back of the head in daydream mode. Now imagine that this is one of the best things you could do in the course of a busy work day.  Continue reading...

My Current Favorite Commercials

Heineken Light - Lady Music (2010) :30 (USA)

Old Spice - Boat - (2010) :30 (USA)

Nike - 'Write the Future' - Epic (2010) 3:00

Late Show: Top 10 Signs You Purchased a Bad iPhone

On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton

A Scientist Takes on Gravity

I love this stuff...

Black holes, in effect, are holograms — like the 3-D images you see on bank cards. All the information about what has been lost inside them is encoded on their surfaces. Physicists have been wondering ever since how this “holographic principle” — that we are all maybe just shadows on a distant wall — applies to the universe and where it came from.

Continue reading...

Free year of Amazon Prime for students

Amazon is offering a year of their free, two-day shipping to anyone with a .edu email address.  Here are the details...

Why not get free shipping when you order Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics?

Play SNES games on your iPad in 4 easy steps

Think of the looks you'd get on the subway...

Android App Inventor, for better or worse

The Android App Market just got a lot "more open." With the App Inventor, non-programmers can create their own app for the Android OS.

One area that the creators of the Inventor are preaching is for education.  I've had professors that allowed their students to download custom practice quizzes.  Now, students using Android phones could download a program from your non-tech-savvy English or Chemistry teacher.

Could this have a negative impact?  I'm sure the Android App Market will have more "beer pong" and "would you rather" games with simplification of app publishing.  But if you're able to successfully sift through the useless apps, you may be able to find some highly useful tools made by non-programmers.

This is a very exciting tool that could give Android another advantage over iOS.

Success Using Modified Broad Match in Adwords

List of modified broad match keywords

My campaign for the Autism Society has access to modified broad match keywords.  After several attempts I was able to find a successful way of using them.  The "Signs and Symptoms" adgroup was getting a high amount of clicks.  I was trying to target people searching for specific signs and symptoms.  Adding the keywords "autism +signs" and "autism +symptoms" created more impressions, clicks, and a drastically higher CTR.

Search terms for modified broad match keywords

The modified broad match keywords helped show my ads to a more targeted audience.  People searching for autism that included "signs" or "symptoms" were more likely to see my ads.  The ad text is then more relevant, leading to a higher CTR.

Search terms for traditional broad match keywords

I'm continuing to use this type of keyword throughout the campaign.  It seems to work best in higher volume adgroups.  For adgroups with low clicks, traditional broad match keywords are performing better.

Ad text for Signs & Symptoms adgroup

United Way Week 8

Autism Society Week 8

Stats in Blogger

Blogger Draft now has built-in stats.  You can access it from your draft.blogger.com dashboard.  After looking at stats for my blog, I was surprised to find the following:

Interesting to see that percentage of traffic from China.  The most popular post was on experimenting with broad match modifiers.  I'm still using this new beta keyword type in one of my campaigns.  I will blog more about broad match modifiers in the future.