WORKING WITH NUMBERS

I am excited to share with you my summer internship experience with Skyscape, Inc, a Massachusetts based company that develops medical applications used on mobile devices such as iPhone, Blackberry, Palm etc. I was part of the E-commerce team which allowed me to handle projects related to both driving traffic to and getting conversions on the website. These projects included Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), email marketing, web analytics, reseller and affiliate marketing, and usability testing.

As a member of the team, I managed the Google paid search campaign and also created a campaign for Bing. Through working on these projects, I had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience with both Google Adwords and Microsoft Adcenter tools. While managing paid search campaigns is no rocket science; however, when there are over 500 products spanning 35 specialties it can become a little challenging. I also had the chance to become familiar with the webanalytics tool, Webtrendz. The amount of data available is both amazing and overwhelming. The extensive data includes: number of users visiting the website, their geographical location, where are they coming from (search engines / affiliate websites), duration of their visits, pages they visited, how they take their coffee etc. Just kidding about the last one!

However, as much as what Skyscape, Inc does and my role as their intern is exciting, what I really want to share with you are two huge practical application pieces that I learned this summer:

1.People who matter understand numbers:
After working on these projects, I have a greater appreciation for how important data analysis is in marketing; The people who are making decisions understand and are motivated by numbers. Thus, it is very important for us, as marketers, to speak their language.

2.Emerson provides us with great resources, make the most of it:
This summer I needed to take advantage of the Usability testing facility at Emerson as a part of my project at Skyscape. Not only was Jon "Satch" Satriale, the technology manager at Emerson, incredibly gracious and helpful, but the fact that this resource is available to us at Emerson is amazing.

I had a theory that Skyscape, Inc could improve sales by making changes on their website, but I was unable to support my theory without real world data; which the the Usability testing facility afforded me the luxury of providing. The main objective of the usability testing was to evaluate the effectiveness of the product pages and the navigation system on the website. The participants that included doctors, nurses and medical students were asked to navigate through the Skyscape website. The session was audio and video recorded and as the participants were navigating through the website they were asked to speak out loud what they were thinking. We were able to figure out which parts of the product pages attract user's attention, what information user looks for while evaluating the products, which navigation scheme does the user use to find the product and much more. Based on these findings we were able to provide recommendations to improve the product pages and also improvise the navigation schemes on the website.

I had a wonderful experience with Skyscape, Inc and learned a lot about how I want to forge ahead in this exciting field of online marketing.