Who I am at all? Hello Performance’s first intern. My name is Hanna, I’m 20 years old and I’m currently studying online communication at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences. The hobbies thing is through Corona, so let’s skip that part. My university requires a six-week internship as a kind of pre-requisite, which is why I’m sitting here now, because where better to complete that than at Hello Performance? The question, of course, is how I got this internship in the first place.
I was really on the verge of despair when I found Marco with Hello Performance on Google. Problem with finding an internship is that most companies are looking for interns from 3 to 6 months, which would not be possible due to my short semester break. On top of that, I’m only in my third semester so I don’t have much experience, so all in all it’s difficult to find a place.
When I saw the Google result, I immediately felt a kind of sympathy for Hello Performance. The super cool astronaut in the logo directly radiated a certain looseness and freshness. Without waiting long I called Marco with the given mobile number. When I rattled off my standard sentence and told him I was a student looking for an internship, he was visibly confused that students were already finding him on Google. To my surprise, I didn’t get a rejection letter, but an invitation to an interview.
After a nice conversation still in winter 2019, I got the acceptance to write a blog post about my time here today after already six weeks and thus in my last week of internship.
Winter 2019 to late summer 2020 is of course a really long span,especially since a lot has happened at Hello Performance in that time. To stay up to date, Marco has been updating me regularly.
Now it was two weeks until my internship started, and Ireceived a detailed schedule about the six weeks by mail. In the best case, as an online communication student, you can imagine something under the technical terms that appear or even know what they are about. But either I wasn’t there when the terms came up in college (physically or physically be damned), or I’m in too low a semester. The third option would be that we don’t exactly address performance marketing in college. But none of the three options can be figured out so quickly now.
Now you can probably guess my slight uneasiness towards the upcoming six weeks. At first I just thought to myself “Oh my God, you have absolutely no clue what this is all about…do you even study?”. I briefly doubted my sanity, knowledge and studies, but then I went to my good friend Google. A few words in the search engine and saw at least a small glimmer of hope. After a few minutes, I also realized that I’m just an intern with no previous bachelor’s degree and no one will rip my head off if I don’t know something. Laptop closed and pulse down.
Monday 17.08.2020, 9:40 am I was now final in the office to start the six weeks. I was a bit nervous, but my joy was fortunately greater. That Monday I finally got to meet Janni. For the time being, the first day served to prepare me fundamentally and to explain all important things in advance with a PowerPoint and to discuss questions. My weeks were split up so that I did my tasks Monday through Thursday in the office and Friday in the home office. The individual weeks always had a thematic focus, so that I could take away as much knowledge as possible in the short time I was here.The focal points were explained to me in practice using customer examples or as pure theory. For your understanding, here is a short list of my six weeks:
- Woche: Analysen
- Week: Analyses
- Week: Website/CRO
- Week: SEO
- Week: Paid Media
- Week: Sales
Analyses in the first week included keyword analysesor target group analyses, which I had already done in university. Super important as a foundation to better define your goals and objectives later. Trackingthe second week was already a step more difficult for me. Here, for example, it was about the Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics, which help you to view data and numbers of website visitors. I had absolutely no idea about either tool, but in retrospect that was no bad thing. The websites or the CROof the third week included WordPress, templates and plugins, which I had already heard about or used one or the other superficially at the university.
Week four started with SEO, more precisely something like the Google Search Console or image optimization. I had already done image optimization several times, but I totally forgot to take it into account in some tasks. Image optimization seems unimportant at first in my opinion, but it really is essential, for example, to shorten the loading time of a website. Paid Media was the focus of the fifth week. Basically, the item includes all platforms on which paid advertising could run. For example, YouTube, Google Search or Google Display. The sixth and last week was all about sales, as already visible in the listing. This can include items such as campaigns and landing pages. In order to optimize the in-house landing pages, I was allowed to think about a few ideas and record them in a scribble. By the way, Janni lost a Papparazzi, which is why there are now also proof photos.
Of course I was able to do a lot more tasks, like reports, blog posts, target group analysis, English websites entered, comparisons of booking systems, implementation of Google Analytics via Tag Manager, phone call with customers, check of usability or keyword optimizations. I also think it’s important to emphasize that I absolutely did not take it for granted that I was allowed to do so much myself as an intern and not just sit next to it and watch.
As a conclusion, I would like to say that I am more than happy to have been with Hello Performance. On the one hand Janni and Marco two super nice, open and funny personalities, with whom it was just fun, and on the other hand I could really learn a lot, because they both took a lot of time besides work to explain and show me the topics of each week.
So herewith again a very big thank you, dear Marco and dear Janni, for the beautiful six weeks and the time you invested in me. It was a very great pleasure and I wish you continued success and all the best.
Your Hanna 🙂
