It's not a good move for businesses to implement a product or procedure without real empirical evidence to back it up. A few of the articles and videos this week were based off of this idea. The Harvard Business Review article, "Finally, A Majority of Executives Embrace Experimentation," written by Wilson and Desouza outlines three types of experiments that are common in the world of business: prototyping, simulation, test groups and A/B experimentation.
A prototype is a first, or preliminary model of something which is used as a model to make more of that item, usually with alterations. BMW uses clay prototypes or "concept vehicles" to gauge customer reaction to new styles and technology.
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| Source: http://luciano63.hubpages.com/hub/Sculptural-car-design |
Simulation is a type of experiment that is also used frequently in the car industry. It's an analysis of alternative actions or undesired consequences. Crash simulation models help car manufactures make important decisions on designs.
Lastly, test groups and A/B experimental design deals specifically with webpages and allows a webmaster to test variances of a webpage on groups of users to determine which page most closely results in the desired outcome.
In the Google Online Marketing Challenge, our groups use experimentation to determine what keywords, campaigns, adgroups and adcopy's give our websites the desired results without spending our budget too soon. We experiment by changing around keywords.
In addition to experimental design concepts, another important concept that was learned was how to set goals, monitor events, and compare those events to key performance indicator metrics. Chapter 15 of The Digital Guide to Online Marketing was about optimizing your websites conversion rate. This is extremely important in the GOMC. In order to optimize our conversion rates and meet our goals, there are some preliminary steps that need to be taken. Each campaign needs to have a clearly defined goal, "events" on how to achieve that goal need to be identified, and key performance indicators need to be set up in order to define and measure progress towards the established goals. KPI's could include things like the average time a customer spends on a website, the length of each visit and the percentage of returning customers.
Chapter 15 helped in organizing my thoughts on our clients website goals, how we're going to meet goals and how we will measure our progress. A lot of the same terms that are used in GOMC were mentioned and defined in the chapter which gave me a clearer understanding of how to use Google AdWords and what I'm doing there.
So far, the most challenging thing about the course has been figuring out AdWords, coordinating with group members and really honing in on the process we're going to use to select keywords/adgroups/adcopies and chart the progress of our goals. As the GOMC campaign progresses I had some questions on estimating impressions and what percent of the budget to allocate to each AdGroup and week. I made rough estimates on the impressions using Google tools and allocated our AdGroup budget according to our client's goals. I was unsure about this though.
Our group had the same issues on estimating on clicks, impressions, and our budget. It is hard to guess when no previous experience is had. We tried to use our company's analytics data to help come up with these numbers. We are lucky that I Made It! Market already had this setup on their website. Overall, I like how you connected experimenting designs on cars vs. us experimenting with keywords. It all does really come full circle when you think about it.
ReplyDeleteHi Steph - thank you for such comprehensive discussions of experiments! Could you also ask some questions that other members of the class can respond to?
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