Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #9

This week saw me complete two long tasks: The first was yet another keywords report, a great list compiled for a phone company's website, targeting their Christmas deals as well as the generic brand names, contract durations and associated details, which slowly built out from specific lists to cover every facet of the four major categories, thereby creating the week's keyword list: This task took me to lunch, during which I finally boiled the kettle for myself and a colleague, as you should when in the office as an unwritten rule of courtesy!

After the break I was assigned a brand new task: An Exchange Report. These are basically spreadsheets (a prewritten template at Carat) into which data is placed from our chosen DSP. The DSP contains for several of our clients, the exchanges through which we buy our media and as I'm sure you can imagine, some of them outperform others; some are so bad that they have to be deleted. And that's where I come in!

Campaign layers: A quick diagram

In the spreadsheet you basically have multiple columns titled by metric, exchange name etc. in order to group your data. In the DSP you can select what metric or campaign aspect that you wish to see and for our task, we selected the CPC/CPA option because we need to know how much our clicks and conversions are costing us. From here, we can see which exchanges are performing well/not-so-well when compared to the average. The averages are calculated by the DSP for each individual strategy, which potentially has any number of exchanges within it (some had 1, others had around 21) and in analysing each piece of data, you can discover the overall effectiveness of the strategy based on how it currently stands regards to each individual exchange, a component of the strategy I guess; and if an exchange is performing badly as a 'damaged' component, you have to notify the architects of the strategy, which is essentially what the sheet is for.

Not the most exciting image I know, but I did make it through all assigned clients in the nick of time, I'm glad to say!







And after all of this, my fingers numb and my eyes stinging slightly from staring into the abyss of Excel for four hours or more, I was glad that I hadn't left earlier: Someone from downstairs came into the office with leaflets for Cafe Nero, a FREE coffee no less! It was strange seeing as I'd bought one on the way to work earlier so I guess I made some cash back the next day, walking back to the university with a Chestnut Latte, which I can highly recommend for the festive season!

See you next week . . .