Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #10

As we reach double digits for my time spent within Carat, the holiday approaches! We've been putting some Christmas campaigns together recently as I'm sure you're aware, putting keywords into practice for those searching for gifts etc. I didn't complete anything of that sort this week but a rather more complicated task.

As I've detailed in previous weeks, I have so far completed Site Transparency reports, Keyword reports and Ad Performance reports amongst others; this time I reported for two clients on overall performance for the last two months. That's pretty much all of those separate reports combined into one behemoth file! Needless to say, the report contained several pieces of data for several different metrics, all of which formed a six-figure cell total.

When you first stare into something so large and you have so much stuff to analyse it's impossible to organise it into just 1 pivot table; I found that I needed at least 3 or 4 since the idea behind the task was to re-evaluate the strategy because in many respects the campaign was failing to get through to a core audience, though there were pockets of times and days when business was good, as well as certain creatives that outperformed others, which I then found were affected, in turn, by the exchange through which they travelled and when I pulled all this together, I started to see a bigger picture. And that's basically the whole point of the task, to discover who was clicking, when, on what days, and as you find a desired audience, you look at what media best sends the message to these people along a valuable exchange.

Imagine doing this for two clients!

Once I completed this task I wrote up my findings and suggestions for the campaign direction in a Word document. We'll see how that performed next week, so fingers crossed! In essence the whole process is just a constant trial and error, using judgement and intuition about why certain things are happening, and what you can do to affect that world from behind a DSP in as positive a way as possible for your client. Sometimes I imagine it gets pretty stressful, especially if nothing's working or there's not much time to get a campaign off the ground, which is where a client might start getting agitated with you. But given that there are many options to chose from, all at the click of a few buttons, chances are, there will exist somewhere in the ether the solution to your problem; you've just got to find it!