Behind the Screen with Digital Project Manager Brandon Trame

When it comes to search engine marketing (SEM), the path to success can seem confusing and time-consuming. Thankfully, 2060 Digital has Brandon Trame, a Digital Project Manager working out of our Cincinnati office who not only helps clients with website builds and SEO campaigns, but also has Google paid search experience straight from the source. Read on to find out more.

Tell me a little bit about what kinds of projects you manage here at 2060.

As a project manager, I have a hand in managing new website projects, SEO campaigns, display ads campaigns, but I focus primarily on running our Google SEM campaigns. I create the campaign structure, write the ads, bid on keywords, and try to get our clients search traffic and conversions – everything that comes with pay-per-click (PPC) using Google AdWords.

So what’s involved in the day-to-day running of an AdWords PPC campaign?

Each day I check it to see if it’s working or not, and decide how to improve it. The great thing about PPC is that results come in so fast – I can see the effects of changes I make to a campaign immediately – which allows me to make educated decisions to optimize a campaign as soon as I see something isn’t performing as well as it should, as well as track the client’s ROI sooner than with other marketing methods.

What kind of training did you have to go through to become a AdWords guru?

Training is ongoing with AdWords, which is Google platform for PPC campaigns. I did have the opportunity to work for Google for a couple months. At Google I had five weeks of intensive learning about the foundations of the platform and how the whole system works.

You worked for Google? What was that like?

It was an internship in their SMB – small- and medium-sized business – service department, so I was on the phone all day long, helping all kinds of businesses advertise on Google. A lot of people were running campaigns by themselves, so if they had an issue or needed help with strategy, there was a Google AdWords help line they could call.

And that was you?

And that was me! There are so many different types of businesses. Managing a campaign and trying to maximize a client’s budget to get them as much traffic as possible is different for every industry. I’ve learned how to maneuver the issues specific to that industry to figure out how they can successfully advertise there.

So what about it made you realize that this was what you wanted to do as a career?

I was studying marketing in college, but I quickly realized I had to have some sort of skill to be marketable myself. And this internship was all about learning AdWords. At first it was like learning a language – very daunting, but you start to get the hang of it, and you start to converse with other people who speak the same language, and the more you do that, the more doors are unlocked.

What made you want to work at 2060 after you had this Google experience?

I was very much interested in this job and in this company because of the range of products and services we offer. And what’s rewarding to me is that we’re helping businesses understand the digital space and getting them in front of potential customers they’ve probably never been able to get in front of before by themselves.

So it’s almost like you’re blazing a trail for them.

Yeah, we’re growing local businesses in all of our markets. We’re helping them find their message and we’re helping them go from just listing their services to thinking about what those services mean for their potential customer. What about their message is going to get the customer to make a decision?

It’s not just about getting people to their website, but what happens next.

Exactly. If there’s a contact form on the page they see after clicking on a paid search link, we can track how many of those form submissions came from our ads. With AdWords, we can see what someone searches, set up our ads to show up when they search those terms, see when they click on the ad and also when they fill out the form and become a lead. PPC with AdWords is one of the only ways you can see that path from start to finish.

When someone’s using a search engine, they’re actively engaged in research and decision making. So we’re helping companies show up so they don’t miss out on that.