Monday, November 30, 2009

Dreamweaver and web design

We looked at the Dreamweaver program over the past few sessions. Dreamweaver creates cleaner HTML code as opposed to word and has a number of other advanced features. The ability to create a separate Dreamweaver 'site' has the advantage of making sure everything needed for the web site is in one place: Cascading Style Sheets knowns as CSS (preformatting for your web page), photos, images and HTML pages. In lab, we recommend putting that site on the network drive and/or backing it up on a portable drive as well. I have been able to solve some problems with website displays by reminding students to put everything in their www folder that the web site needs, including CSS's and images. Also, make sure in Dreamweaver you just have the image name and not a specific location on the desktop or network drive, otherwise the image will not display. Remember to use tables and not frames for your web page for good web design. Enjoy your web site design!

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

The power of viral video

We have been having so much fun with our YouTube campaign that I have almost forgotten to blog about it. We really had some wonderful results for gimmepleez.com, our Professional Sales Program and the Interactive Program. I have included the results to find the four videos for our program below. Students found that facebook, particularly creating an event, was the most successful way to get the viral effect. We jumped to the first page on google when searching for the term Interactive Marketing and are currently number two. We could never have paid for that type of search ranking in PPC! Web site traffic is also up by over 75% and enrollment in our advanced classes is up over 30%. Great job everyone and a great lesson in viral marketing. We learned that a specific landing page or micro site would have made it easier to track campaign results and that tracking results of viral campaigns is in general a challenge, particularly unique views. Students got a chance to actually report on and analyze the analytics information provided in YouTube. Overall, we are pleased with our results, learned a lot and had some fun. Students said in their papers that the learning by doing experience of running a real campaign helped them understand what Interactive Marketing was all about and what they might do in their future careers.

Have a good Thanksgiving everyone. Check out our videos below.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=interactive+marketing+niu&search_type=&aq=f

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Website analytics

We looked today at website analytics. I showed my google adwords account and google analytics account as well as the insight section of my YouTube account and we looked at the types of information available and the types of insights that might be made from that information. We also looked at some of the recent trends in online advertising. Online ad spending is smaller than last year but growing overall. Sponsorship and mobile marketing are on the upswing and most results can be attributed to search and older media rather than social media and some of the new media....analytics are lagging changes in technology. Traditional ways of looking at web analytics include number os unique visits, pages of visits and traffic source. A landing page is a good way to tie a campaign to a particiular web page to track the results. Some analytics, such as page views and time on the site, can be misleading, as people might just spend time on the site but not really be engaged on the web site. "Bounce rate" with a web site means when the user leaves the site. There are so many metrics and so many possibilities. Some good rules include, always test, look at trends, track key metrics and set goals. We also talked about the difference between data, information and knowledge and how markters want to create databases that can be used to gain customer knowledge for better offers and relationships with customers.