Web Business Creation Reflection

 This week we talked about social media and how it can impact our SEO and get more people onto our websites. There are lots of different social media platforms that I could use to promote my website, but not all of them will be equally useful. It depends on who your market segment is and what you're selling. Four social media sites that I could use to promote my website are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tik Tok. Some of these would be more effective than others, based on the market I’m trying to appeal to. I personally despise Tik Tok as a platform, and I’m also trying to cater to an older market segment that isn’t as present on that platform, so I wouldn’t prioritize that one. I actually think the best one for me might be Pinterest, because it draws in the kind of market that I’m going for.   Social Media can be used both to promote your product and help teach people about it and increase social consciousness, but also as another place where you can put up ads to promot...

 This week we learned about landing page optimization and SEO. Landing page optimization refers to making sure the page an ad directs to is relevant, well designed, and easy to navigate. The biggest takeaways I had were that you should make sure that if an ad promotes something really specific, that the landing page has the same thing the ad promoted. Say your ad is about women's sneakers being 25% off, then it should direct to a page with women's sneakers that are 25% off. Another thing would be to make sure the landing page focuses on a single call to action, so that the user knows what it is you're promoting and what you want them to do. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it's pretty complicated. Basically, search engines like google have very complex algorithms that they use to analyze web pages and decide if they are relevant enough to show up at the top of the results page. The exact algorithms are unknown, but we know that keyword usage, site design, ...

 This week we talked about optimizing ad performance. We were given a case study where we looked at the data for an ad and the keywords and had to decide which ones to pause, delete, or ad. Figuring this out can be really tricky, but if you utilize the data it can give you a clue about what is performing the best. You can look at the CTR to see which keywords are actually leading people to click on your ad and get to your site. Then you can see your CPC to see how much you spent compared to how many clicks it got. And then you can look at the conversions for each keywords to see which ones are leading to the most sales. By looking at those numbers, you can decide which keywords are most worth the cost for you.  The other thing we learned about this week was conversion tracking and ROI, which stands for return on investment. Basically, a conversion is something that makes you money. Usually, a conversion is a purchase. But you could also decide if there's something else on your...

     This week we learned about relevance and Quality scores for google ads.  The three things that quality scores are based on are the expected click through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. If someone wanted to improve their quality score, they should evaluate each of those components to see how they could improve them. For instance, expected click through rate could be improved by making your ad more engaging or enticing, including a call to action, and making sure your ad matches the buyer’s intent. Ad relevance could be improved by making sure your keywords and ad terms are in line with what users are searching for. You could improve your landing page by making sure it matches the ad they clicked on, takes them directly to what they want, making sure it’s user friendly, and ensuring that your website works on mobile devices as well as computers. If a person made even one change to each of those three components to improve it a little bit, then th...

 This week was lighter as far as content goes. We just learned about how to create ads and ad groups and optimize our headlines and descriptions. I found the video about responsive search ads very helpful. It explained the different types of ads. Responsive search ads are ones where google basically picks two or three of the 15 headlines you give it, and puts them in different pairings with the descriptions you give it in order to make ads that best suit a person's search terms. So it uses algorithms and stuff to optimize what the person is seeing, so they're more likely to click on the ad. That's pretty cool in my opinion. I had fun thinking of so many headlines and descriptions. Google helped generate a bunch of them, and then I kind of just tweaked them to make more sense or be more relevant to my website. But overall, I was pretty impressed with the suggestions it gave. I found it really useful that you can pin specific headlines to a certain position (1, 2, or 3) to ma...

     This week we learned about creating a google ads campaign and optimizing keywords. When I created my ad campaign, I limited my geographic location to the United States. This is because I don’t want to deal with shipping costs for people outside the United States, even if it’s just to Canada. So I only want people within the US to see my ads. I want to show my ads on both computers and mobile devices, because I want a broad variety of audiences to see my ads. If I were to prioritize what devices to bid for more, I would choose mobile devices because I feel like people use their phones more and are more influenced by ads they see when on their phones.       I think some characteristics of a good keyword are that it is relevant, specific to your product or service, and that it’s what customers actually use. A keyword might be very relevant, but not common vernacular that people will search for. It also would be best if you can find keywords that have...