What is warchalking? – A Word Definition From the Webopedia Computer Dictionary.

The act of making chalk marks on outdoor surfaces (walls, sidewalks, buildings, sign posts, trees) to indicate the existence of….

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Barbados Phone Book Another great looking wordpress theme by Woothemes.

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Late last night after a long day I stupidly booked some flights online with BA.com. I say stupidly because I was tired. And when we are tired as human beings we are prone to make mistakes. Which I did. I entered the wrong date by one day in error. I thought okay, no problem I can see the error I’ll just phone up British airways customer support and have them change the date, shouldn’t be a problem seeing as I’m about to correct this mistake within 5 min of making it.

It turns out that the British Airways UK customer relations helpline was closed. So I called the US British Airways customer relations. Although the latter could not assist me because my booking was made with the Ba.com UK website they advised me that it wasn’t a problem, it wouldn’t cost anything, that they would make a note of my call and to wait until the next day and call the UK customer relations when the helpline was open again. I thought great, fantastic response, filled with confidence, I’ll fix my flights in the morning!

The next day…

Sorry sir you cannot change your booking without it costing you an extra £130! What?! (knowing full well it actually costs £90)

But it was an honest mistake. The lady from British Airways Customer Relations in the US said it would not be a problem.
Surely you have some flexibility when you make a mistake and try to amend that error with in 5min?

The response was like a robot.
No,
No,
No Sir,
British Airways cannot do anything.
I’m a brain dead operator who cannot be bothered to help or understand.

Not very helpful at all.

Can I speak to your manager please? (thinking they may be more sympathetic and could possibly over ride the operators scripted response.

No I will not escalate this problem.

What?!

That got me angry!

I’ve been a loyal British Airways customers for over 5 years now, booking flights here and there and more recently quite a few more. This obviously counts for nothing.

So I went back online, payed the extra £90 (not £130) to change the date of my ticket. I then jumped on to my blog to moan and rant about them.

I feel a little better now for the rant. It’s good to to talk! :)

 

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Yahoo Delays Moving Ads To Microsoft’s AdCenter | ITProPortal.com.

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Ad Effectiveness.

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Google Testing Instant Previews On Ads (Here’s What It Looks Like).

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Adwords are finally giving more insights into their landing page polices… let’s hope this trend continues and they give more insights to all their other polices.

More clarity in AdWords for advertisers affected by landing page policy

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Ad Center’s Quality Score where do we stand?

As we all know Microsoft’s Ad Center introduced their own version of Quality Score very recently. Most advertisers frustratingly saw a massive drop in impression share, clicks and spend. Although Ad Center support can be very helpful and easier to deal with than adwords support, some very common repsonses were coming back that led me to believe they had no idea about their own quality score system. Answers to questions were very vague, and their solutions were not the ones we wanted to hear.

Time will tell while we all get to grips with the new system. One thing is for certain is that Ad center is no easy traffic source that it once was. That said it is still ever increasing in its market share.

It now seems clear that the good old days of buying broad keyword terms in Ad Center are gone. They have adopted a Google style Quality Score algorithm. Annoying? Yes.

But we had better just get used to it the way we did with Google.

How do I get a good quality score and get my campaigns spending like the old days?

It’s fairly simple really, once you you let go of the old ways of running your ad center account.

It’s time for a spring clean!

  • clean up you keyword list, get rid of all none performing keywords. This means keywords with a low ctr and zero clicks. Too many non performing keywords will a have impact on your relevancy. Get rid of broad keywords or at least some of them, turn on exact and phrase match. Focus on high CTR keywords and try and expand upon them.
  • Stuff your landing page with relevant keywords.
  • Have lots and lots and lots of relevant content on you landing page.
  • Ad text. Ad text can always be improved, create lots of ad text variation. Re submitting your ads for approval after completing the above points can improve you campaigns performance and might just get them spending again.

 

 

 

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I found this useful article for Microsoft’s Ad Center. Check out this link for account, camapign, adgroup, adtext and keyword structure and set-up.

 

Ad Center Help and Tips

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TwitterTwitter is a great way to promote new blog posts to followers, but tweets can very easily be lost in the overcrowded social stream. This is why it’s a very good idea to repeat yourself when using social products like Twitter or Facebook. You simply cannot rely on everyone seeing one single update. The timing of these updates is also very important. There are quite a few products on the market that allow you to send random or scheduled tweets, but from my research they are either pretty expensive or restricted by Twitter’s API policies. In short, you’re better off doing it yourself.

We wanted an easy way to randomly select a tweet to post to Twitter. So we built a plugin that randomly selects a blog post and creates a tweet that includes the post title, permalink and hash tags created from the post categories. All you have to do is copy and paste the text into Twitter.com or your favourite desktop app. It’s very simple, but it’s an effective way to quickly keep your stream updated with tweets to random blog posts.

Download the latest version from WordPress.org.

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