Online Journalism Practicum:J415

2. Keyword: Ohio University

Only two returned sponsors: www.CollegeBoard.com and www.ClassesUSA.com. Absolutely this keyword is underused. College bookstores and OU athletics sites could start a campaign to get more business or generate interest in OU sports (esp. for attending sports events with giveaways).

4. I set up an AdSense campaign for Speakeasy and just finished installing code for all our article and index pages. I worked with AdSense during the summer for my internship, but only had to insert code.

Even though you place these ads on your site, there are many factors involved in driving the clickthrough rate. Because they are text based, more text on a page is better and must be targeted with special tags to hone in the specificity of the ad. The more specific to the topic at hand, generally the more likely someone will click the ad.

Placement on the page is also important. If disguised in a site's colors, the ads may appear like navigation and someone may accidentally click on them because they seem less obtrusive.

I don't think the real money comes from these people. The real money comes from the more expensive ads being clicked on, which is a toss up unless you specifically have text which targets these ads. For a site like College Bookstore, they could easily target ads on expensive items' pages. For something like Speakeasy, this is less effective.

I did a search for Athens, Ohio and there really wasn’t much there in terms of sponsored links. The top link was www.OhioHotels.org. There were two other hotel sites, a Yahoo travel directory and a link to areaguides.net.

I would like to see sponsored links that have something to do with Ohio University since that is the major draw to this town. Certainly the book stores and OU athletics would do well. Also, there should be some sponsored links from businesses in the town, such as local bars, coffeeshops, or the Athens Chamber of Commerce and others. I would imagine links to information about the southeastern Ohio region would do well also.

In terms of hotels, the OU Inn should put a link there. At least it would be some place local putting up an ad rather than these general sites.

2. keyword: OU Bobcats

I searched for OU Bobcats and there were only two sponsored links: Ebay and a ticket agency.

I think this keyword would be a great opportunity for a campaign because OU Bobcats is probably a very popular search for students (both current and prospective) and anyone interested in Ohio University sports. The bookstores and other athletic apparel sites might use this as an opportunity to advertise their Bobcat gear. Also, the Ohio University Athletic Department might post a link to their main athletic site, where people can view game scores, calendars, and see what kinds of sports OU has to offer.

I searched for "Athens Ohio Apartments."

Among the sponsored links along the right hand side of the page there were only half of the links that had anythinng to do with apartments in Athens. In fact, the first link was for a company in Athens, GA. As a student who is currently searching for an apartment, only two of these were helping and showed apartments actually in Athens.

Neither of the two sponsored links at the very top of the page had anything to do specifically with apartments in athens. The first one was a search of Columbus and surrounding areas, only showing four listings for Athens that weren't even all within the Ohio University vacinity. The second link was for apartments.com, which is a national search engine for aparments that only let me search the Athens area. And even when I typed in my very lose requirements for an apartment, it still only came up with one entry.

Basically there is definitely an opening for a good campaign to come in and take over these search words.

In my own search for an apartment I've come across many more sites that deal more specifically with the Athens area and OU in general that were much more helpful than the sponsored links currently being brought up. I think if any one of these sites started buying up keywords like "athens ohio apartments" and such that they would rise to the top of the sponsored ads pretty quickly.

2. Bonus: I am currently working at Ohio Univeristy Without Boundaries, a company that designs sites for online graduate degree programs. i was just recently taught how to use their Google AdWords and Overture campaigns, and by the beginning of next week will have set up my own campaign for one of their programs.

I got onto google and searched OU Bobcats. I was surprised that there were only two sponsored links on the search return. I think there is definitely potential for a site like Speakeasy to make some money here. The two sponsored links were ebay.com which was selling Bobcat gear an dtheticketagency.com which was selling tickets to OU sporting events. Being that there are only two sponsored links Speakeasy could set up shop for this set of key words and have a great chance of getting clicked. These key words could fit the description as well because Speakeasy tends to focus mainly on culture and OU Bobcats could be a search for people looking for information about campus life, especially sporting events.

I attempted to set up AdSense for my blog project. However, I am having trouble figuring out how to get the ads to display on my blog. I found something about html coding on Google, however, they sent a notice saying they would review the site and then get me started. It doesn't look like it is going to be all that difficult to do. There is just a lot of fine print which to look at.

Speakeasy already has an ad sense campaign. The cool thing about Ad Sense, which I did not know until I logged onto Speakeasy today, is that you can customize the type of google ads that are linked to the site so that they are relevant. For example, I noticed today on the music review there were links to ads for bands of a similar genere of music, or for Yahoo! music downloads. I think that is useful and am excited to find google ads that are relevant to my project blog.

I would like to see more local businesses pop up for "Athens Ohio." People visiting Athens - prospective students/parents, current OU parents - would probably like to know that Athens doesn't just consist of the university and a few hotels. I bet the townspeople would want them to know that as well.

Great little places like Donkey and Haffa's Records could definitely benefit from a little more advertising. A lot of people don't know they're there. Then again, that's part of the appeal of the small, local business.

I agree with Steve that sites about the southeastern Ohio region would benefit. I also agree with Caren that the local bookstores would do great - Specialty Books has a Web site but I don't see it anywhere on any of these searches. The College Book Store's Web site is buried as the 20-somethingth search result.

I also find it interesting that Miami University is a top result for "Ohio University"!

The keywords "Ohio University" and "OU Bobcats" have virtually no AdWords campaigns in place -- which leaves them open to advertising. Also, the advertisements that are in place don't originate from local websites. I would like to see local businesses capitalize on this. There is a lot of potential to increase the interest and presence of local sports teams for the keywords "OU Bobcats" -- merchandise, tickets, schedules, game records, etc.

The keywords "Ohio University," as wide open as it is, leaves great potential for local businesses/institutions in Athens to generate interest, traffic and revenue (if utilized properly). Especially those that are already affiliated with the University in the first palce. The Ohio University Inn, College Book Store, and Follett's Book Store are just a few that come to mind off of the top of my head.

Keywords:
“Athens Ohio”

The results in Google turned up adwords related only to hotels (at least at the top of the screen).

In Google, I found the site http://athensohio.net/
Looks like a random mish-mash of Athens info, perhaps put together for the sake of getting clicks from the ads on the page.
Other top five links include
The OU mainpage http://www.ohiou.edu/
>>With the Ohio Program of Intensive English showing up as a top sublink | www.ohiou.edu/opie/

Then OU showed up AGAIN | ohio.edu/

Followed by the City of Athens page | www.ci.athens.oh.us/

Then lastly the athensohio.net site previously mentioned.

I found it interesting because I repeated the same search in Yahoo, and my results were a little different. My first result was the link to the Yahoo local page about Athens, followed by the Chamber of Commerce page, Ohio University front door, the Wikipedia entry for Athens, followed by the link to the Athens City Transit page.

The Yahoo sponsored links were all for hotels, too. My thinking is that since the top five links (with the exception of Yahoo's local page and the Wikipedia entry) are all local-centric sites that show up, it would be worth the while of some local businesses--at the least some local hotels--to purchase the adwords. I'm also thinking maybe ohiobobcats.com (official OU sports page) would really benefit from buying some sponsored adwords. I don’t think Speakeasy adwords would be beneficial since we really are only trying to attract a local audience (and most likely they wouldn’t be googling with the terms Athens Ohio; rather, they would already know where to go).

“Ohio University”
This turned up results for OU first, but was immediately followed by links to Miami! OU would do well to sponsor links to its admissions page—and again, back to www.ohiobobcats.com Links to collegeboard.com and ckassesusa.com as sponsored links could be easily replaced—even further would be adwords sponsored by the individual colleges within the school, such as the College of Business or even the J-School.

“OU bobcats”
This is maybe the one search string I would consider putting Speakeasy adwords. I think our sports coverage is pretty decent, and I wouldn’t mind drawing a national audience for that section. The OU bookstore probably was wise to put adwords on that page so Bobcats fans who are away, trying to look up stats for their team can still get their apparel—but I think the bookstore would be just as well served to buy adwords on “ohio university” so that incoming freshmen (who love sporting OU gear before they get down here) could be tapped as a market as well. What’s interesting is that the oubookstore.net link is for the bookstore that serves the regional campuses. Follet’s, College Book Store or Specialty Books would also be very well served.

“Athens Ohio Apartments”
Ok, this search string turned up some very lame results on Yahoo. Local realrors need to jump on this search string to get their properties listed! All the results were national ones, but I know that most of the apartments (at least a lot of them) are owned and operated locally. A good adwords purchase might be the Student Renters Union of Ohio University, a student senate project to improve our “student ghettos”. http://www.thesruou.com/

Google results were a little better, turning up some local realtors like Klienpenny; however, many of the listings were for Athens, Georgia!

3. Set up Adwords
Since we sort of decided we’re not willing to pay for a national audience for Speakeasy at this point, I decided to set up an Adwords campaign for my own personal site. If you Google “cara mccoy” or “cara Athens” you should see my name! I thought it was interesting because I also tried to set up adwords for “cara michelle”, which is my middle name, but Adwords told me that it was ineffective and wouldn’t let me.
Let’s see if I get any job offers from this, lol.

4. Adsense
We’ve already got Adsense built into Speakeasy. We’re working on changing the placement of the ads in the body of the articles to hopefully beef our clickthrough rate. I think we need to work on our context a little since many of the ads turn up weird/funky terms, especially if we look at them in the context of the article.

5. I was very relieved to hear that there was indeed a gorilla in the movie, and that I haven’t lost my mind completely :)

Athens Ohio Apartments

2. The top two are Athens Ohio Student Rentals and Ohio Apartments. It seems odd that there are no specific companies listed. Places like Carraige Hill and Montecello are no where to be found. There are only generic compelations of available listings. The worse part is that several are for Athens, GA. There is a huge opportunity for local companies.

3/4. I have no place to do this yet. I'm looking into setting up AdWords for a local company. I'll post an update to this if I figure that out.

I searched OU bobcats and found only two sponsored sites, eBay, and a ticket agency. I think that there would be profitable gain for the bookstores in Athens, as well as Ohio University admissions, if they sponsored this search word. The bookstores would drive traffic from people, (current students, prospective students, parents, grandparents...) interested in Bobcat gear and apparel. The admissions office, and the atheletic department, (ohiobobcats.com) at OU could also use the traffic gain of prospective students looking to get information on OU's teams, and fan following.

I searched Athens Ohio and the top links were all hotel sites with the best hotels in Athens. Athensi could benefit from purchasing Adwords if just to increase traffic. The problem would be paying for the increased traffic since Athensi isn't a site that brings in lots of money. Sites that make money from people coming to them would probably be more interested in Adwords.

OU — Collegeboard. com is the only one
Athens Ohio — hotel links
OU bobcats — ticketagency.com
Athens Ohio Apartments — only a few local advertisers

I think this shows a possibility for a few things — Athensi could easily get traffic from a Google-sponsored link. Area renters also could make some hay, as some already have.

2. I searched for Athens Ohio Apartments. On the left side of the page, the top link was an apartment site in Columbus. The second site was a site in Athens, GA. On the right, there were many more sponsored links, the first being a national site that didn't even have Athens on the map. The second link on the right, www.kleinpennyrentals.com, was the first that actually had apartments in Athens on their site. Of the rest of the sponsored links, only 3 were relevant to Athens, OH.

On my personal hunt for an apartment, I have come across several sites that are also for apartment hunting purposes. However, I found their links in the newspaper with apartment listings. I think there is an opportunity for one of those sites to buy a more prestigious spot on the list and really drive traffic to their site. However, two of the listings, Kleinpenny and AthensRent.com are nice, easy to navigate sites. Other apartment sites in Athens aren't so new or easy, so they might have to step up their web development a little.

On another note, maybe the Athens, GA, sites should refine their search worlds a little. Although Athens, GA is bigger than Athens, OH, I'm sure that site is losing money when people like me click their link. Whether it makes enough difference for them to change their keywords I don't know.

I will get back to you on the Adwords and Adsense experiment.

All:

Good work on this assignment. I think the one thing is shows is that there is some opportunity to use keyword search buys to drive traffic to sites in Athens, Ohio. I also think it interesting that Jen discovered Miami Ohio U is a top result for Ohio U. That's every competitor's dream. Think about it: Wouldn't Coke love to be the first result when someone searches "Pepsi"?