Concept: You Can't Eat These Technological Cookies
One of this week's new concepts involves technological cookies: What they are, how they work, and how you can optimize them to your specifications. According to the lecture provided by the Google Online Marketing Challenge, cookies come in multiple forms but most consistently they are used to store information about a specific user on a website or web service such as email or online shopping. The Visitor Identifier Cookie provides each unique browser that visits a site a unique ID and this ID is present across all sessions in the same browser. This type of cookie expires every 2 years, if not deleted first. The Session Identifier Cookie determines the beginning and the end of a session and expires after 30 minutes of inactivity from a user and is then deleted from the browser. The Traffic Source Identifier Cookie stores the traffic source information for the session, so essentially it stores information about where each visitor is coming from. This cookie is stored for 6 months or until it is overwritten by a new traffic source. Finally, the Custom Visitor Segmentation Cookie allows you to define your own segments for reporting such as a segment of visitors to your website which fall into a certain desired demographic. This cookie expires 2 years after it's last update. Knowing the types of cookies used to store information, or how you can utilize cookies to collect information about traffic to your website, can play a very important role in refining your advertising. If you see that over half of your website traffic is coming from one website, you can choose to spend more of you advertising budget on that website to continue increasing traffic. The one thing that needs clarification to me about cookies is if it is possible to get any data from people who have their cookies disabled. I know this is a function that is available on all computers, however if someone has their cookies disabled, is there any information that website users can still obtain from the visitor?
Concept: How Google Analytics Works
Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that can be enacted on any website that chooses to utilize the service. In essence, webmasters are able to collect data about where their web traffic is coming from, what hours of the day their website is most visited, and many other areas which are extremely important to improving their website traffic and visibility numbers. There are multiple steps which illustrate how Google Analytics works:
1) Your website loads on any device
2) The Google Analytics Javascript begins to fire
3) The first-party Google Analytics cookies are read from and/or written into the browser by the Javascript code
4) A GIF request is created and sent to the Google servers
5) Data is sent to Google's servers
6) Data is processed and pre-aggregated
7) Data is made available in the user interface or through the API
These steps are critical in understanding the background processes happening when you are looking at the data collected by the Google Analytics process. Without knowing how Google Analytics is working, it is difficult to trust the data and numbers you are presented with when you are analyzing data. This way, you can be assured that Google Analytics is working in the background just as you would hope it would be. In terms of using Google Analytics, I would be curious to see how many webmasters are actually utilizing it's functions and are able to make changes to their website according to what the analysis showed.
Skill Set: Using the Google Search & Display Networks for your Campaign
Using the Air Jordan case study provided by Google, it becomes quite apparent just how useful knowing how to properly use Google Search and Google Display Networks can be for campaign success. In this example, the Air Jordan marketers realized that they needed a new spin on their traditional flashy tv marketing ads. They came up with Leroy Smith, the boy who took Michael Jordan's spot on the varsity basketball team in high school. Jordan attributed that moment to the first time he realized how much harder he needed to work in order to make it into the professional arena of the sport. audience. Played by actor Charlie Murphy, the campaign’s Leroy sold motivational DVD that promised to teach viewers the same skills he used to dominate Michael Jordan. The DVDs, along with posters, an iPhone app, and music videos can be found on his site, www.getyourbasketballon.com. And of course the campaign’s Leroy also has a YouTube Channel, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter feed to communicate with his fans. By using keyword targeting to automatically place their ads on highly relevant sites on the Google Display Network, the team was able to find the right locations for their creative more quickly and efficiently than if they had sought out the sites individually. This proves how important it is to have a working knowledge of the Google Search and Google Display networks. My question is how much trial and error it took for the marketers to find the sweet spot of exactly where they should be marketing.
In the Future: I'm Ready to Start the GOMC
Honestly, all of this buildup before we can actually start the Google Online Marketing Challenge is starting to drain me. I am ready to start putting everything we have learned into practice and see how well my team can do in terms of increased website traffic for our client. This whole semester has been a challenge since all of these concepts have been so new. But overall I am learning a great deal and I am excited to really put all of these skills into action!
