Robbin kindly agreed to a little mini interview today about the event. Here’s what she had to say:

Scott: $285 — that’s a cheap 1 day event. Are spots filling up quickly? Will be nice at the Harvard Club — guess that would be because you’re a Harvard Alum?

Robbin: Spots are filling up, although I asked for a really large room, so I think we are ok, at least for now. As far as the Harvard Club goes — it’s not directly because I am an alum, it’s because — as an alumna — I have been there many times, and I know what it’s like. (In between college and business school, I worked for Harvard Magazine, and took prospective advertisers there for lunch.) I didn’t have to go check it out, which was a real bonus.

Scott: Would you describe this training as applicable for all GA users? Beginner,
Intermediate, Advanced (on your site you note that if you haven’t worked with
either GA or other web analytics packages that this might not be the right event
for you).

Robbin: Yes, it is for all levels. We are going to work very hard to make sure that all levels are happy because the person who is just starting has different questions from the person who has been working with it for a couple of years. As far as the person who doesn’t have GA – I think s/he needs a marketing seminar (“Why GA is good for your organization,”) and this is straight education.

Scott: Why did you make the decision to break off into tracks in the afternoon rather than running a second day around these more advanced themes/topics?

Robbin: That’s so interesting, that you think of these as more advanced. In fact, one track is marketing (“How do I use all these data?”) and the other is implementation (“So how do I enable my users to take their cookies with them from my domain to my third party shopping cart?”) Those are often two different people who care about those topics.

Scott: If you had to think of 5 major issues that most people implementing GA run into what would they be? How will your training day resolve these common problems?

Robbin: Well, there are issues around using GA, and then there are issues around implementation. The big marketing (user) issues are “What does all this stuff mean?” and “How can I leverage these data to make my website better?” The #1 implementation issue that new users run into (after they get past, “Why don’t my data show up immediately?” and “Why can’t I see last year’s data?”) is, “How can I make my email marketing and other campaigns talk to my Google Analytics?” As you can see, the marketing (using) issues are very global and continue from the beginner on to the expert, and the implementation issues are very specific and get solved quickly. They are two different beasts.

Scott: Who from LunaMetrics will be on-hand for the training day? (you have such a talented team there)

Robbin: This is the time for false modesty, right? But seriously, Traci Scharf and John Henson will be there, and I will too. We also invited Megan Kiel from the Google Website Optimizer team, and she is going to speak on that topic in the afternoon.

Scott: Any plans to make this training available again in the future? (I can’t make it, others may not be able to either)

Absolutely. But Scott — we’ll do it only if you can make it. Next time, I will clear it with your calendar first…

Scott: Finally, will Avinash be making an appearance or will you be able to bask in your own glow as GA gurus? (ha, ha, ha)

Robbin: Well, he knows how much I love him and wish that he would be joining us, but he is going to be somewhere in Europe at that time.

LunaMetrics: Google Analytics Training Day is a post from: benry blog

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Because we’re a credit union based in BC (and operationally are bound by a charter that limits our selling area to this region) we set our Google Adwords campaign to display only to searchers in CANADA > BRITISH COLUMBIA.

We had someone indicate that they couldn’t see our Adwords ad when they searched for one of our key phrases. Google’s interface was indicating we were gettting impressions and click-thru for this keyword and their ad diagnostic tool indicated that our ad was being shown for that keyword in our geo-targeted market — so we were a bit perplexed.

In the end, to test things out I fired up my laptop and did a search on Google myself. Sure enough, no ad appeared (though I could get our ad to appear if I searched for something like “term deposits british columbia” from the same computer).

 

So I spent some time in Google Adwords and on e-mail back-and-forth with Adword support and discovered the problem.

Google’s targeting relies on it being able to determine the users IP address. I, like the user who was unable to see the ad, was connected to the internet via a wireless connection. Google couldn’t interpret the IP address coming from my wireless, so it reported a “null’ value, and thus our geo-targeted ad was not shown even though the person and ISP was located in B.C.

Given the ever-growing use of wireless connections in the home and at work for internet connectivity, it seems like a potential for significant traffic loss when running PPC ads that are geo-targeted and a big advantage for internet marketers who sell nationally and don’t need to geo-target their ads.

• Has anyone else run into this before? The folks at SEOmoz have and wrote an interesting article on it.
• If so, how have you addressed this problem with your geo-targeted campaigns? Google suggestion has been to create a regionally targeted campaign with general ad text and keywords as well as a country targeted campaign with region specific ad text

Are your geo-targeted PPC ads being seen? is a post from: benry blog

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