branding me 2.0

Help Me On Some Homework Please?

I need some help making sure I did my analysis correctly. Our clients have seen a pick up for their market recently (real estate), and I am wondering if what I think I found is correct: I’m basically working on inferring intent. We have a few months of data now, and I want to know what keywords tend to attract people that look at higher-priced product.

I went to the content section, filtered by floor plans, and by using Google Analytics new pivot table feature, I pivoted by keyword (organic and paid). I exported the top 50 keywords and rearranged a little bit in Excel. So, the data is organized by keywords on the left column, product category on top, and pageview counts in the middle:

____________Plan 1___Plan 2__Plan 3

Keyword___PgView__PgView__PgView

Keyword___PgView__PgView__PgView

(Sorry for the weird formatting; Tumblr doesn’t like tables evidently)

Here’s the thing; I calculated a mean,  standard deviation, lower and upper control limits for each column individually; then, using conditionally formatting, I visually brought out the keywords above the upper control limit, but only by column… not for all the data put together. Does that make sense? Not just in my explaining, but in how I’m going about the analysis?

So, here’s what it looks like (click on the image to see larger):

And this links to a “public” (read:scrubbed version) of the Excel file if you’d like to take a look at exactly what I did. get link to revised spreadsheet below

Anywho, I figured this is one way, but I am sure there are many others. You can chat about this through my username brandingme on Gmail or AIM. A simple tweet of this is good, this is wrong, or I’m going about this the wrong way helps too :D

**UPDATE**

So, I’ve been thinking a lot more about this analysis, and I revised the Excel file. Basically, instead of doing the upper control for each individual column, I did it for all the data, which you will see on the bottom if you download the spreadsheet. Still no feedback from anyone though :-(

Digital Strangelove

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet), via AVC.com

Unboxing Bing - Advertising With Microsoft

I may be spoiled because my company was already doing search marketing years ago, so I didn’t have to set up the Google and Yahoo accounts. I’ve been tasked with setting up a Bing account though, and thought I’d share my thoughts along the way.

Billing

Billing is annoying. We don’t have a giant budget so we can not get invoiced, but we have to spend X number of dollars for 4 months to become a “trusted account.” I understand the need for trust, but I had three different phone reps tell me three different things along the way. That’s frustrating.

Pausing An Account?

I set up a dummy account until I could get a credit card for the real account. I want to delete the old account (or at least pause it), but I have no idea how. I’ve even searched the help section, and to no avail. I simply tried deleting it, but it said it had active ad groups. Trust me, it doesn’t. I paused those ad groups. And the campaign. And paused them again for good measure (kidding).

Time Zone

Oooo, I would love to love to be in Athens! I don’t know about Ulaan Bataar. though. But alas, I must set this to meager ‘ol Eastern Standard.

Campaign Targeting

Interesting; I can even target by demographic. I’ll have to read up on that when I have time. If I select only to show in the United States, why doesn’t it show that after I hit “Apply”? Do I even need to only select the United States?

Budgets

Okay, I’ve set the budget to be per day; now why is there a red exclamation point next to maximum monthly budget? I know from entering the credit card the red exclamation is nothing short of an omen…

Negative Keywords

Okay, I have my Excel sheet open, but no copy paste for me. I have to use commas to separate multiple words or phrases?!?!?! OMG. Over the years we’ve developed a very robust negative keyword list, this is going to take forever…anyone know any shortcuts????

[EDIT] The shortcut is my colleague sitting behind me. Done and done. [EDIT]

Oh. Now even more hassle. The character limit for negative keyword list, including commas, is 1024. But, heck, I hit “Apply” and it looks like it accepted. Fine with me.

Ad Group Settings

Huh… I didn’t even know MSN had a search and content network. So, let’s only do keywords for now, hit continue and…dang it. “The character limit for the negative keyword list, including commas, is 1024.” Boo. If I remember right, there is no limit for negative keywords on Google. I’m just going to delete all of them for now.

Hit continue and…”You must select at least one type of ad distribution for your ads to be displayed.” Whaaa??? Okay, guess they don’t have a “search network” like Google (Maps, Amazon, et. al.) Guess they literally mean the search engine itself.

Okay, continuing to next page, the ads.

Text Ad

Oops. The ad text goes only on one line, instead of two like Google. Okay, copy and paste three text ads, save, and done. Not to shabby.

Keywords

Alright! Keywords, baby, keywords! Copy, paste, add to keyword list. BOOYAH. Done.

Keyword research tool to the right. Hmm, I’m curious. Okay, type in “[city] apartment”, and my keywords suggestions are:

• [city] [state]
• [city] hospital
• [different city] apartments
• [city] high school
• [city] public schools
• [city] school district

Um, no thanks. Moving on…

Pricing

Hmmm, so I know what these words cost on other engines, but if Bing doesn’t get as much search volume as other engines, they probably should cost less. Done.

Review

Okay, everything looks right to me. Submit. Done.

Now, rinse, wash, and repeat until all the ad groups are up… a lot of ad groups. Can I just go home already?!?! To my wife? And 30 Rock? Le sigh…

El Fin

This was a very frustrating experience at first. The pros: targeting by location was fun, but it seems like you have type actual places, rather than being able to do a circle that is X miles wide, like in Google. Another pro is more text available in the ads, so you can undo all those dumb abbreviations and spell out the whole word. One last con, besides everything else I listed above, is the budget estimates. It’s really confusing where they are getting their numbers from, or what the numbers even mean.

Peace out.

A Future of Entertainment

I get excited when I see other people thinking the way I do, as in, when they share my vision of the future. The biggest reason why is it’s a small confirmation that I am in fact not crazy. This is a relief :P

Fake Steve Jobs wrote an article for Huffington Post giving his take on what we will experience with the new GodTablet iTablet. In the persona of Fake Steve, he shockingly compliments Brian Lam of Gizmodo for his understanding that the iTablet will be a source of hybridized content.

Anywho, this is where I pat myself on the back (hahahah); two years ago I wrote about an eBook that presented a similar desire for this “hybrid” content (although I didn’t call it that). Basically, I wanted an all-inclusive reading experience that would include photos, video, music, etc. Good to know Apple with be providing a gadget that will fulfill this desire and induce child-like wonder.