Carat Media Internship: Journal Entry #21

Last week was an eventful one at Carat to say the least, as I carried out a new set of tasks revolving around Sitelists. The day primarily focused on spreadsheets that showed all of our website placements from which I had to decide which ones to exclude. After analysing every site in every strategy, I had to compile a Sitelist Removal list that was later inserted into Doubleclick. As long and arduous as it may sound, analysing the sites wasn't all too bad, mainly because the only sites that I had to analyse were the ones with irrelevant URL names, e.g. in a campaign for a camping site I found sites for boating and island purchasing!

Once I'd completed the site lists I showed them to a colleague who placed them into an Exclude list on the DSP in order to remove funding from adverts there in future revisions. He explained the difference between the include and exclude functions and when they would likely be used. For example, if one were engaging in a prospecting campaign, then once many ads had been distributed to as many sites as possible to drum up business, the trial and error method of revision would be applied afterwards. This of course will mean excluding grossly under-performing sites, but for other campaign types (such as retargeting ones,) an include-lead approach may be more efficient because you know where the customers have been before and will want to include a possibly narrower site list. A very enjoyable experience that bestowed upon me new understanding of Doubleclick, which should hopefully benefit my future work.

Now moving on a second set of sheets, were produced for the same client: Day-Part analyses for keyword lists tailored to national campaigns, tackling both Scotland and Northern Ireland. These keyword lists were basically split into the various line items we were running for our client, with each list separated into hourly performance. After organising the tables I discovered the key performance for our client to be across many hours, with some lists performing in the mornings and some in the evenings. This was of course noted in the analysis.

Dayparts

My final task also revolved around keywords for a ticket site, for which I had to discern the performers from the under-performers and list them as before. This was again followed by exclusion on a basis of CPCs, click numbers and CPAs to discern the few that were performing, which in all made the day a rather successful one.

 Keyword Groups