Campaign Improvement/Study Progress

My campaign has hit a major improvement this week. I created a separate ad group for my most successful key word "Tiger Shelter". The ad campaign reached its high this week (2/21-2/25) on the 24th at 8-9%. Making another add group made all the difference. This is what I need to do more often in order for this campaign to be successful. I will continue to try new things in order to increase the success of this campaign. A screen shot of the progress is shown below.

I also will take my third attempt at the AdWords Fundamental exam for my certification. This time will be different than the other two. I will be taking this exam at a time where I had time to prepare.(where as the last two times I took it as practice). I am hoping through all my time studying and going through the exam twice, getting a good feel for what is is going to be like, that I can pass this exam.

Campaign/Studying Process

My campaign has not been doing well this past week. As you can see below this paragraph, I have only had a few successful this past week.  Only three keys had a CTR of above 0.00%. The words are “tiger sanctuary”, “tiger”, and “Tiger Animal”. I deleted the other four key words. Even the graph, below this paragraph, showcasing the CTR has not done well. I am trying “The Tiger” “Tiger’s New Home” and “Tiger Shelter”. I am hoping any of these keywords will help with my campaign.

I also have also created a study plan for the AdWords Fundamentals exam. There are three main modules for the exam. My goal is to study chapter one for two days, a half hour each with the flash cards I made. Then after those two days, I plan on adding module 2 flash cards into the mix. After those two days, I plan on adding chapter 3 flash cards into the mix. After studying for three more days, I am going to retake the exam to try to pass. I will have a lot of studying to do, especially trying to balance it with my campaign and other course work.

Keyword Planner

In addition to studying for the Goggle AdWords certification exams, I have been working with a non-for-porfit campaign Google AdWords. The Google AdWords campaign is for the National Tiger Sanctuary. This was a list of tigers to choose from to advertise. I chose a tiger named Midnight for my Google AdWords campaign.

Midnight is a black tiger that was owned by a private individual. She was given up when the owner ended up having a child. You can look all this information up on nationaltigersanctuary.org. Based on this information, I have chosen the following keywords for my campaign, “tiger”, “Black”, “given up”, “tiger sanctuary”, “Baby tiger”, “New home”, “Feline”, and “Black Night”.  I am going to get rid of “Feline” and “Black Night” for sure because they both have a CTR of 0.00%. For those you who do know, a CTR is the number of clicks your ad receives divided by the number of impressions (each time your ad is shown on a search result). Given that, CTR is a really good determination for the relevance of your ad for your campaign. Therefore, a 0.00% is not good so “Feline” and “Black Night” will unfortunately get the boot. My instructor recommended we delete any keyword with a CTR of below zero. So “Black”, “given up”, and “New home” have also been deleting. After four days with the words left, this is the how the last three key words have done.

In order to get inspiration for good keywords, I tried keyword planner on Google AdWords. Some of the keywords suggested that I liked were “Tiger Animal”, “Large Cat” and “Wildlife Sanctuary”. This has given me ideas to use the following keywords “Wild Cat Sanctuary”, “Black Animal”, and “Large Baby Tiger”. I am hoping that these keywords will help me with my add campaign. 

AdWords Fundamental Exam, First Time Around

 Going for the certification in Google AdWords will be really challenging.  There is a lot of information to study for each of the two exams needed to get the certification. We need to pass two of the six exams from Google AdWords. Our professor is having us take the AdWords Fundamental exam and the Search Advertising exam.  There is a lot of information to cover with these two exams, but once I earn the certification, all the hard work will be totally worth it.

I will be taking AdWords Fundamental exam as practice to know what the exam is like. This will be very helpful because when studying for the exam I know what the exam will be like. When taking the AdWords exam for the first time, I saw that a lot the questions were examples of when you should use a search network or display network, or other concepts for AdWords Fundamentals. I think this is better than just listing the simple definitions of a term, because if you cannot pick out examples or determine what the correct course of action is, then simply knowing the definitions are useless.

I am going to have to do a lot of studying before I take the exam for a second time. I did not do that well the first time, which is not totally unsurprising due to taking the exam this time was just about getting a feel for what the exam will be like more than it was passing it. In order for me to pass the exam the second time around, I am going to have study really hard. I know this time, having weeks to study for the exam, I can get at least an 80 %( the grade needed to pass) on the exam. In the meantime, the following picture below is going to have to be me. 

                         

Google AdWords Introduction/CareerFest

Learning about search engine marketing has been really interesting so far. I have learned a little bit about using key words in Google AdWords. There have been issues of people using exclamation points and other similar types of errors in their key words, which is not appropriate for Google AdWords ads. Even though I myself have not done this, yet it is a very interesting to learn. With this course, I look forward to learning all the tricks with Google AdWords in order to enhance my marketing career.

Speaking of Google AdWords, I have really learned how useful a Google AdWords certification, and digital marketing in general, is for finding a job. Last Friday (01/29/2016), I went to CareerFest (they actually did spell it CareerFest, with no spaces) at North Central College in Naperville. This was where many companies were offering various types of jobs and internships for college students. There were many marketing internships offered from various companies. There were some internships in digital marketing alone as well as marketing internships were knowledge of digital marketing was a plus. One of the companies, SWC Technology, was offering summer internship in digital marketing. The representative there seemed impressed by the fact that I was in the process of getting a Google AdWords certification. It really shows the increase demand there is for digital marketing.