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From the monthly archives:
December 2008
The beautiful PingMag.jp serves up a feast of amazing images on an almost daily basis. Covering fashion, film, graphics, graffiti, typography, architecture, manga and high-tech toilets, there is always something interesting to look at on PingMag’s pages. It’s easily one of my favourite websites.
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If you use WordPress, you should take some time out and cast your votes for features for version 2.8.
Potential Feature Ranking for WordPress 2.8.
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Looking for a worthy cause to donate money to this Christmas? Then look no further….
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.
Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Wikimedia video with clips from Truth in Numbers.
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Working remotely, not being in the same office, or even time-zone, as your colleagues, forces you to rely on many tools to communicate, collaborate, manage, account and track.
We use quite a complicated set of mainly web-based tools to do this, but it’s worth it, because it allows myself and my team to stay remote and flexible. And the last thing we want is to go back to the daily commute!
Here is the officeless infrastructure we use:
- Communications
- Sales & CRM
- Project management
- Blogging
- Accounts, Bookkeeping & Billing
- Marketing
- Hosting
It’s interesting to note how important web-based tools are to living the work-from-home dream.
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Selling the concept of PPC to the un-initiated is tough. The value proposition is complicated and requires a lot of explaining and proof. Simply telling businesses that you can get more customers, more economically from PPC doesn’t seem to work. I know, I’ve tried.
Microsoft recently commissioned a small report on this and found that whilst businesses understand the need for a website, they still fail to understand the need to drive traffic to it.
73 percent surveyed would rather do their taxes than start a search marketing plan
It’s very common for business websites to be built with the mentality that people will discover it and love it. This is far from the truth, the shear number of sites online mean that ANY new site will have a seriously tough time reaching its market without some kind of marketing spend.
Andy Beal covers the same report over at Marketing Pilgrim: Small Business Don’t Get It–Still Failing to Invest in Search Marketing.
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Here’s a really good idea; make designers more responsible for content:
We, the people who make websites, have been talking for fifteen years about user experience, information architecture, content management systems, coding, metadata, visual design, user research, and all the other disciplines that facilitate our users’ abilities to find and consume content.
Weirdly, though, we haven’t been talking about the meat of the matter. We haven’t been talking about the content itself.
Yeah, yeah. We know how to write for online readers. We know bullet lists pwn.
But who among us is asking the scary, important questions about content, such as “What’s the point?” or “Who cares?” Who’s talking about the time-intensive, complicated, messy content development process? Who’s overseeing the care and feeding of content once it’s out there, clogging up the tubes and dragging down our search engines?
Source: A List Apart: Articles: The Discipline of Content Strategy
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One of the most common tasks when working with Google AdWords PPC is preparing campaigns in Excel ready to be loaded into Google’s AdWords Editor.
We think the following process is the quickest and most effective method for producing these lists in Excel. A lot of the speed comes from learning the keyboard shortcuts for various Excel commands, as typing keyboard shortcuts is faster than clicking around with the mouse.
The overall goal here is to create 1 Excel sheet for a specific campaign or upload.
There are 3 main pieces of data that we have to create:
- Keywords
- Ad Groups
- Ad Text
The following sheet will contain all of these ready to be uploaded.
Start with a list of keywords
Typically, we start with a list of keywords tailored to the product we’re advertising. For this example I’ve used the keyword ‘widgets’ and results from the AdWords Keyword Tool.
Next, organise the keywords into Ad Groups
This is the most labour intensive part, but also the most important! At this stage we categorise and group the keywords into relevant ad groups; combine miss-spellings into correctly name groups and also edit out and delete keywords that are not at all relevant.
If you add in the Excel AutoFilters you can make life a little easier by sorting a re-sorting the keywords into related themes.
Now, add the search and content bids
If this is a new campaign, you’ll probably want to start by bidding well within in your budget.
In this example, we’re using Ad Group level search and content bids. To create different bids for different ad groups you need to ensure that the bids are present on every line of the Ad Group.
At this stage it may look a little redundant to enter bids for every line in an Ad Group, but as you’ll see later it make sense to fill out the sheet as completely as possible…
Time to write the ad text
OK, we’re almost half-way through creating a our campaign. Now we’re moving on to the most labour saving part of the process.
Creating individual pieces of ad text for an entire campaign from whithin the AdWords website interface can be extremely labour intensive. Doing this in Excel is a massive time-saver.
The time saving comes from Excel copy-down feature, this can be used either by copy and pasting cell contents or by using the fill handle in the bottom right hand corner of the selection marquee.
As you can see in the animated illustration on the right you can very quickly create sequential lists of data or you can quickly copy and repeat the same data. When you combine this with formulas and text it is becomes a very powerful way of quickly creating ad text.
Headline
For the headline we may as well keep things simple and use the Ad Group name, we can do this with the formula =A2.
Description line 1 & 2
In description lines 1 and 2 we are going to use ad copy that is relevant but that can also work accross the whole campaign.
Display URL
The display URL will simply be the url of the site.
Destination URL
The destination URL is simillar but we like to track everything we do in NetInsight, which means we need to add some tracking parameters to the query string. Using Excel this is nice and easy as we can use a formula to dynamically grab the right data.
Now, we’re ready to upload this data to AdWords Editor…
To do this you simply copy and paste the right columns in the right order for the 3 main multi-input panels in AdWords Editor:
Add/ Update Multiple Ad Groups
Add/ Update Multiple keywords
Add/ Update Multiple Ad Text
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You may of read about my hard drive issues last month. One set of files that became corrupted was my download of HBO’s Rome Season 2 (a seriously underrated show, which shouldn’t have been canceled).
Under the impression that I had paid iTunes for the right to own the show, I figured I would be able to re-download it by hitting Check for Available Downloads (I think this used to be called Check for Recent Purchases) feature in the iTunes Store menu. This worked for me before, but as it turns out, this option is only available during the initial download, once that is complete iTunes do not offer a re-download. When you buy from iTunes you do not buy a right to own the show, only the right to download it once, I learned.
iTunes do make all this perfectly clear, and you are supposed to make backups of your downloads. Nevertheless, I still started to wonder about the value of paid downloads versus say paid DVDs which last longer or free bit torrents which are free.
In what I thought would be a vain attempt to email support I explained my issue. And I was pleasantly surprised that they allowed me to re-dowload my show and then genuinely shocked at the high level of follow-up and all-round pleasantries of their support gal Bianca:
On Dec 13, 2008, at 22:30, iTunes Store <iTunesStoreSupport@apple.com> wrote:
Hey Jonathan,
This is Bianca again , with a courtesy follow-up. I haven’t heard
from you and wanted to make sure that your request was handled to
your satisfaction. You’ve truly been a remarkable asset to the
iTunes Store Family and as such I don’t want to leave you without
any type of resolution, so if you do not respond, I will be closing
this request. I hope that you continue to enjoy the iTunes Store and
would like to thank you for being such a wonderful member of our
family. If you find yourself with any other questions or concerns,
please do not hesitate to send me an email.
It has been a pleasure assisting you Jonathan. Thank you for being
such a valued iTunes Store Customer. Have a wonderful day!
Sincerely,
Bianca
iTunes Store Customer Support
On Dec 14, 2008, at 0:09, iTunes Store <iTunesStoreSupport@apple.com> wrote:
Hey Jonathan,
Thank you for your kind words. I’m so glad to hear that we were able
to get back your purchases after a hard drive error.
Nothing makes me (Apple) happier than to hear that we have pleased
our customers. I wish you the best and hope that you continue to
enjoy the iTunes Store.
It has been a pleasure assisting you Jonathan. Thank you for being
such a valued iTunes Store Customer. Have a wonderful day!
P.S. Love your name, that is the name of my first born.
Sincerely,
Bianca
iTunes Store Customer Support
Thanks, Bianca. You are very helpful and I’m happy. Merry Xmas!
Sent from my iPhone
On Dec 14, 2008, at 11:42, iTunes Store <iTunesStoreSupport@apple.com> wrote:
Hey Jonathan,
I don’t mind if you blog it at all. I want to let everyone know that we are here for our customers. I want to make sure that all your iTunes Customer Support experiences are the best they can be. It is easy to provide great customer service when we have great customer.
Thank you very much for being a valued iTunes Store customer Jonathan. Your business is greatly appreciated.
Sincerely,
Bianca
iTunes Store Customer Support
Bianco, that’s easily the nicest support email I’ve ever received.
Mind if I blog about it?
Sent from my iPhone
All in all a really pleasant experience thanks to Bianca. I’m now firmly of the opinion that there is no limit to the amount of support and time you can offer an existing customer, because it works especially in the impersonal online world.
I will continue to pay for downloads and will never buy a DVD again, or wait for days on end for bit torrent file.
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