Life in the Blue

That’s right boys and girls, I can’t do it all myself. Fortunately I live in a town of 75,000 people, and 35,000 are college students, so there is always an endless supply of cheap labor. However, finding a diamond in the rough of self indulgent underachieving college students can be quite a daunting task. Fortunately, I was blessed with the excellent work and ideas from two students at good ole Mizzou.

One of them wanted to share a bit about her experience as a SEM intern. She is an up and coming one, watch out for her at PubCon 2012 my friends…

In my recent internship interviews, the one thing every potential employer always narrows in on is what I have on my resume as a search marketing assistant. They usually then proceed to tell me how impressive and rare it is to see someone, especially my age, with experience and knowledge in online search ads and programs such as those in Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. For the first time, I have learned real skills from a job that I can carry with me throughout my career in advertising. As the internet marketing industry grows at an almost alarming rate, these skills will only be more beneficial as time progresses.

There were many other aspects that I enjoyed about this job as well. For one, I had the opportunity to express a form of creativity through landing page testing and Google advertisement testing. While these tasks sometimes felt tedious and repetitive, I take pride in the fact that I was able to continually think of new words and strategies every time. In a way, this taught me that no matter what, ideas are never-ending and something new will always be out there.

That’s right my friend, great ideas are everywhere.

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Google is doing all kinds of updates these days, they rolled out the new Google Analytics last week. Occam’s Razor had a great post on a lot of the new features, check it out.

My only beef is that they got rid of the dynamic content report. Anyone have any ideas on how to access the information that used to be in this report?

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Well, it’s official. I have been cancelled. Despite all arguments to the contrary, apparently it is possible for a blogger to be cancelled. Now I know what it would feel like to be on The OC. One day you are living the good life in the blue, making fun of the chicks in Mission Viejo, and the next day you are yesterday’s reef sandals.

In early April Google announced they would be switching the blue adwords background to yellow, leaving my ‘lifeintheblue’ domain about as useful as Brent Musburger’s commentary about the game of college basketball or the west coast offense. I had been seeing some blue and some yellow for the past month, but it appears it is all yellow all day now, leaving me rather…well…blue.

The part I don’t get is that now you have to click on the title of the ad in order to be taken to the lading page of the ad. Before you used to be able to click anywhere on the ad. I would think this would lower the overall CTR of pay per click ads. But perhaps it increases the amount of quality clicks, since it would be much harder to accidentally click on a PPC ad, resulting in fewer bounces.

Of course I can only assume Google has my best interests in mind. With no real way to do some sort of control testing, it is hard to tell if the new gold way is making a difference in click thru rate. But I trust Google. I trust Google to watch me while I sleep at night, take care of me when I am sad, or protect me from the evils of life in the real world. I am sure they know what they are doing. There has got to be either an increase in CTR, or decrease in bounce rate with the gold set up. Google doesn’t do things just because they woke up and felt like doing work just for the sake of work.

So, lifeintheblue readers, this is our last blue dance. Enviseo tells me that blogging is uncool anyway. It was a passing fad around here that came and went just as fast as America’s fascination with Hanson. And I trust Enviseo too. People follow him to know what jeans to wear, food to eat and music to listen to. So it is probably best to follow his advice on when and when not to blog as well.

I will still be around, to lend my help, advice and tender loving care here and there. I considered doing a 301 to lifeinthegold, but some people haven’t had success with that, so I think I will stick with this domain, it has grown on me.

So if you can’t sleep at night, still check it out, and hopefully my continued mastery of the English language and written word will sooth your otherwise restless soul.

Point being, if three years ago you had told me I would be maintaining a blog, I would have called you a monkeys uncle. So I don’t view this as a failure. This is a success. I aimed so low, that even since I succeeded, no one cared. Abandon hope all ye who enter.

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