This is where I talk about work

It's hard to believe that I've already reached the 6 month anniversary at work. Time really goes by fast when there are mountains of things to do. But what is it that I do?

I have no clue who's reading this, but I'm going to bet that those who are don't fully comprehend what Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is. That's not me being elitist; that's me admitting that I work in a really niche field. But it's a really niche field that fully appeals to my love for marketing, advertising, and numbers.

There are many types of advertising. Commercials you see on TV, ones you hear on the radio, pop up ads, etc. I work with the most glamorous of them all... the ads that appear when you search for something on a search engine. Go ahead. Type something generic into Google. Say.. "dogs". Someone created those text ads you see across the top of the results and along the right hand side. I didn't create those, but I do something of the same ilk. I think of keywords that people might use to search for our product. All keywords are sold on an auction system. For example, having an ad show up for "dog" would be more expensive than using "little black labrador" because more people search for "dog" and will therefore see your ad more often. So once I have a list of keywords I want to use, I figure out how much I want to pay for each of them

Yet paying for keyword space is not even half of what I do. If it were as easy as throwing money at search engines, everybody would be doing it, and the richest companies would have the best positions all of the time. But the search engines are smarter than that. Yes, one way of getting your ad to show up is by spending the most money. However, your ad also needs to appeal to people using search engines. On a very basic level, appeal is calculated by the percentage of clicks on your ad for every time someone sees the ad (also called 'click-through rate'). That means that the most exciting part of the game is to try to find ways to get people to click on your ad more often than they click on your competitors' ads.

That's what I spend a good majority of my time doing. I'm constantly working with numbers to see what factors can be manipulated in order to get more people to click on our ads. Sometimes, changing just a single word in the ad gets it more clicks. It's often fascinating watching numbers show the immediate effects of your changes and the long-term effects of the economy playing a part in what people are searching for.

Can I say this is what I'll be doing forever? I don't know. Do I love what I'm doing? Absolutely. I learn more and more every day with some of the smartest SEM professionals that I know. And I definitely look forward to learning more.