Before I Try RentACoder… [Edit: Got My Help, Thanks!]

Posted on October 3, 2007 by in Uncategorized

Thank you to all of those who responded.  Due to overwhelming interest, I’m going to have to withdraw the offer for additional people to work on this, or I will be unable to pay everyone who has offered to work (and everyone who has, until this point, offered and produces acceptable work will be paid). 

… I thought I would mention this here.  (What is the purpose of RentACoder and similar?  To connect money with talent while bridging the trust gap.  I’ve got money, you’ve got talent, and if you are reading this you presumably know me to be an upstanding sort.  Given that, I see no reason to pay RentACoder a 10% finder’s fee for finding you.)

I have a task I need done for my small business.  It requires basic computer skills, a good command of the English language, a bit of creativity, and a whole lot of drudgework.  I work crazy hours at a Japanese company and, frankly, while I have expectations that this venture will pay off handsomely for me I have very little desire to do drudgework after I get home at 10 PM.  I estimate the task will take approximately two hours, and will pay $30 for it.  There will be significant opportunities for further work at similar rates if you do a good job.  If you are an enterprising individual who thinks that sounds interesting, read on:

1)  Create 20 lists of approximately 25 words or short phrases, one word/phrase per line, in plain text format.

Specifications of what lists are acceptable appear below.

2)  Open each list of words in Bingo Card Creator.  This step will require a registered copy, which if you are working on this project you can obtain from me at no charge.  (My email address is (my first name)@bingocardcreator.com)  The free copy is yours to keep.

3)  Using software such as PDFCreator(freely available from Sourceforge, it is a virtual printer which you print to and out pops a PDF) and the like, create 1 PDF file of 8 cards printed 4 to a page.  The cards should have the column headings BINGO (see the Options Menu).

4)  Create one GIF of one card printed alone on a page, of any consistent resolution less than or equal to 575×600 at which a)  the card is centered and b)  all words on the card are clearly legible.  The cards should have the column headings BINGO (see the Options Menu).When I have done this process by myself, I have used step #3 to create a PDF file, then opened it in Acrobat Reader, taken a screenshot, and manually cropped the shot in Paint.net to the specification.  If you can devise a more efficient manner of doing this, by all means go right ahead.

5)  All files should be named descriptive-name-of-list.txt, descriptive-name-of-list.pdf, and descriptive-name-of-list.gif.  )Separate words with hyphens.  (Example: romeo-and-juliet-characters, important-european-cities, etc)  They shall be clustered into directories named after the categories you choose, which will be described below.  When delivering to me, zip them up.

Desired Characteristics of Word Lists:

  • Lists should be words which are strongly relevent to each other and related to a specific theme which is appropriate to primary or secondary education.  Examples of possible themes: words about Valentine’s Day, capitols of the United States, periodic table symbols, characters from Romeo and Juliet. 
  • Lists should be exactly 25 words unless the list is of a defined set of things which would be incomplete with 25 elements (for example, capitols of the United States), in which case include them all.
  • Characterize lists by subject matter.  You have wide discretion in what subjects to use and what falls under each category, but please try to ensure that all categories have at least 3 and no more than 5.  For example, if you do Romeo and Juliet characters, you might decide you have a Literature category and will need to fill it out with at least 2 other Literature lists.
  • All words and topics should be appropriate for use in a classroom.  If in doubt, throw it out.
  • Spelling and factual accuracy are absolutely critical.  Please use modern standard American spellings for all terms with multiple alternatives (e.g. Kyoto not Kyouto, color not colour, Beijing not Peking, etc).  These words will eventually be used in an educational setting, and we can’t have children learning that Berrlin is a Major European Capitol.
  • No overlap between lists.
  • No overlap with lists already provided with Bingo Card Creator (check the Wizards menu if you are unsure).
  • You can have one category be math problems, if you’d like.  If you do, make the types of problems diverse (for example, 5 lists of multiplication questions will not be acceptable, 1 list each of addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division problems would be acceptable).
  • You must not violate anyone’s intellectual property rights to compose these lists.
  • You must not look at other bingo card sites (other than bingocardcreator.com) on the Internet to develop these lists.  I am imposing this requirement out of an abundance of caution, to protect both you and myself from claims that you are infringing on another’s intellectual property.

It takes me approximately 6 minutes to prepare the above requirements for one list of words.  Accordingly, 20 lists is approximately 2 hours of work.  You may well be able to accomplish it faster if you more diligent than I am or if you automate the image generation.  I am willing to pay $30 for the above deliverables for 20 sets of words, so you should end up making $15 an hour, which is half again my best paying part time job from my college days.  If you already make much more than that, this offer will likely not interest you, but feel free to refer this opportunity to a bright young nephew or starving college student of your acquaintance.   

I will commission the above work from at least three sources.  If I am particularly impressed by the quality from any source, I will a) pay them a bonus at my discretion and b) offer them the same rate on a MUCH larger order(s) of lists.  This could potentially reach into the several hundred, pending our mutual agreement on the matter and continued performance.

Quality:

Since you’re probably angling for that bonus and additional work, in addition to doing the job you’ll want to do it well.  Here are the subjective things I would like to see.

  • Broad coverage over a wide variety of disciplines
  • Word lists which are subjectively interesting to teachers/students (for a biology list, “varieties of flatworm” is far inferior to “parts of a cell”)
  • Bingo cards which are aesthetically pleasing — the words are clearly readable and of similar font sizes (they are automatically resized to fit if they are too big, but the effect can be jarring if some words are HUGE and others phrases are tiny).  Bingo Card Creator performs best on relatively short words and phrases, and looks substantially less nice on words longer than, say, “Massachusetts”.  If something doesn’t come out quite right, try playing around with the font size a little bit.  Bonus points if you use non-default font types or sizes in a way which enhances the card (see my Harry Potter card for an illustration of the technique — its a vaguely mystic free font).

Legal Stuff:

  • I will pay you on receipt and acceptance of the deliverables.  (Typically, as a freelancer, you should be asking for something upfront to ensure you will be paid.  However, if you’re reading this you presumably trust me to make good on my promises.)
  • If you are otherwise capable of doing the work, it doesn’t matter a whit to me where you live or what language you grew up speaking. 
  • Payment will be by your choice of either Paypal or, if you reside within the United States of America, a paper check.  I will attempt to make payment “very darn quickly” after receiving and accepting the deliverables, but for form’s sake we’ll say 3 days if by Paypal and delivery of the check to your door within 14 days if by check. 
  • I consider you to be an independent contractor.  Taxes and any paperwork, if there are any in your locality, are your responsibility.
  • You represent to me that you are legally eligible to work where you are working.
  • As this is work for hire, you agree to assign all rights in the deliverables to me.
  • Fair warning: I will be blogging about the results of the project that I use your work in.  If you don’t want to be mentioned by name, tell me so or I will assume otherwise.  (Conversely, if you want a free link out of the deal, it is yours for the asking.)

If you’re interested, and have read this far, send me an email to inform me that you would like to try this and to request your copy of Bingo Card Creator.  I’ll greatly appreciate a descriptive subject line.  This offer expires on October 15th, 2007 or earlier should I call it off (at my discretion).

Thank you to all of those who responded.  Due to overwhelming interest, I’m going to have to withdraw the offer for additional people to work on this, or I will be unable to pay everyone who has offered to work (and everyone who has, until this point, offered and produces acceptable work will be paid). 

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Bingo Cards On Rails

Posted on September 29, 2007 by in web design

No, despite what you might think, I haven’t decided to make Bingo Card Creator into a web application.

I was thinking about the full length of my conversion funnel today — from the very second someone gets on my webpage, to the instant they’ve clicked the “Send Patrick money!” button at Paypal or Google.  I was thinking “Is there any step in this process which could be easier or more streamlined?”  And of course there was — there always is.

The most prominent feature of my home page is a screenshot of Bingo Card Creator, which is dead center and dominates the page.  I know that screenshot captures viewers’ attention instantly, because a) when I made the icons prettier on it I started selling a lot more and b) CrazyEgg tells me that something like a quarter of the people who so much as glance at the page click on it.  When they click on it, the screenshot expands in a Lightbox effect. 

What I would like to happen: The visitor should, at this point, say “Wow, that is cool.  I want to try that.”  Then they click on the Free Trial button on the right, download the free trial, install the free trial, play around for a little while, click on Purchase Now, and come pay me money. 

What really happens:  Exactly that, some of the time.

What else happens:  The visitor, not too computer-savvy and left without direction, just closes the browser, hits the back button, or ambles on to read more from my website.  Not that I mind reading, you understand, but I want to encourage folks who are ready to do more than read to skip the reading and proceed straight to the trial.

So, I hit upon an idea — put the whole process on rails (in the non-Ruby sense of the word).  I know what I want the customers to do, so why not tell them?  Plus, the screenshot as it is is busy — it isn’t exactly clear what message I’m sending, other than “This program exists, and look, it has pretty buttons”.  (Do not discount the effect of pretty buttons!  Doubled my sales!)  In particular, the bottom of the screenshot (where I put advise for new users) is offputting: its a wall of text and, as we all know, nobody reads on the Internet.

So here’s what I changed about the screenshot (only after clicking to view the screenshot, mind you).  (WordPress may cut these off — click for full-sized.)

Original

became

New Version With Instructions

You’ll note the second version gets rid of the ugly Wall-O’-Text and replaces it with a nice, hopefully readable instruction on what the person probably wants to do. I used the blue for the Download Free Trial text to mentally prepare them that the Download Free Trial button is blue, without having to say so (I tried, but it started to feel cramped).

So let’s test it:

1)  Create the two images.  D’uh.

2)  Create two versions of index.htm, one telling Lightbox to use image #1 and one telling it to use image #2. 

3)  Upload them both (second one is index-alternate.htm), check for errors.

4)  IMPORTANT: Ban index-alternate.htm in robots.txt to prevent Google from smacking me with the Duplicate Content penalty.

5)  Go to Website Optimizer, get Javascript, insert, upload again.

6)  Identify conversion page.  Ideally, I would like a conversion to be actually downloading the trial.  Unfortunately, the trial download links go to an .exe and a .zip, and so I can’t exactly insert the conversion Javascript in them (for reasons beyond my ken, Website Optimizer won’t let you piggyback on Analytics’ use of a Javascript call to record clicks on non-html pages).  So, I punted and instead inserted it into the Free Trial page, because everyone downloading a trial needs to visit there and if I get 10% increase in the number of visitors there that is a good thing even if they don’t all necessarily grab the trial.

7)  Blast 5,000 4,200 visitors a week past my home page and see which one wins out.  (Edit: my original traffic estimate for September was off, so I updated it.)

8)  Do it again, and again, and again.

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Google's Conversion Optimizer… Rocks

Posted on September 28, 2007 by in Uncategorized

Earlier this week I mentioned that I had started using Conversion Optimizer, Google’s new thingamagig where you bid Cost-Per-Action (CPA) on the content network instead of Cost-Per-Click (CPC) and let their black magic sort it out.  The preliminary results are in: this is the best thing to happen to AdWords since AdWords.  Not only is it a totally automated smackdown of the most egregious spam sites (and quite similar to a solution I proposed a few days ago), it has drastically cut my advertising expenses while not hurting revenue that much at all.

Pre-Optimizer Daily Spend: $10-12

Post-Optimizer Daily Spend: $5-6 (down 50%)

Pre-O CTR: .8 to .95 %

Post-O CTR: 1.1 – 1.2 %  (up 50%)

Pre-O Clicks Per Day: 100 to 120

Post-O Clicks Per Day: 60 to 80

Pre-O CPA: 45 cents to 50 cents

Post-O CPA: 25 cents (down 50%+)

Twenty five cents.  Twenty five cents.  Wow, has it been a while since I’ve seen that number. 

Lets do the math here, shall we?  Assume that all trial users are equally likely to convert, which I cannot substantiate but believe to be more or less accurate when we’re talking in aggregate.  My conversion from a trial to purchase is, in round numbers, 2.5%.  If I pay 45 cents for a trial, then I am paying $18 to make a sale worth approximately $24 to me.  I still make money, but Google and the content publisher get most of the value from the sale, and I do all of the work.  Boo that!  And if I’m paying 50 cents for a trial, then I pay $20 for a sale worth $24, and at that price I might as well just not run the ad at all. 

If, on the other hand, I get trials at 25 cents, then one purchase at the margin costs $10.  Much, much better.  That doubles my profit margin without me lifting a finger, other than to turn Conversion Optimizer on.  Google and the content provider also are getting decent returns, which ensures that both will want to continue doing business with me.  For once the interests of Google, the content provider, and the advertiser are in perfect alignment here: I get the best CPA on sites which are closest to my niche, which means the readership is more motivated, which raises their CTR on my ads.  (This is because visitors at Mrs. Lindle’s Reading Tips are much more likely to want to play bingo today than folks reading snazzygurl413’s MySpace page.)  A higher CTR means that Google gets more for the same amount of ad inventory.  It also means that Mrs. Lindle gets more money, because they are putting high performing Bingo Card Creator ads on her site instead of the random garbage that Google usually fills low-CPC niches with, and even MySpace benefits, because they are no longer “selling” me 10,000 impressions a week which never generate so much as a single 8 cent click. 

When Google does things right, wow, do they do things right.

What is the downside?  Well, if you’re the tinfoil hat sort, you can worry about this one: to do this, Google needs to know exactly how much a conversion is worth to me.  That would, theoretically, allow them to achieve the holy grail of monopolies: perfect price discrimination.  That describes a situation where the consumer surplus (extra value you capture because you pay less for a good than what you value it at) vanishes, and this maximizes the firm’s potential profits.  Joel Spolsky mentioned that the market effect of two competing firms bidding on AdWords does exactly this, and classical economics predicts he is right.  With the information I gave Google to sign up for this option, there doesn’t even need to be a competing firm for them to intuit how high my maximum price is.

But, for the moment, I’m extraordinarily happy, as my advertising has gone from barely above water to, what is the vernacular, making money hats.  (Lets see, 25 conversions a day is 750 a month times 2.5% is about 20 additional sales for $300 profit.  Not bad for a business which typically profits about $700 a month.  Not bad at all.)  I’m really praying the preliminary results hold up. 

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Long Overdue, But…

Posted on September 26, 2007 by in blogging

… Bingo Card Creator is finally getting its own blog.  I have only had ninety minutes to work on porting the site’s template over to WordPress, so it isn’t quite ready for primetime yet.  You can see what I have got if you go over to www.bingocardcreator.com and append “wordpress” as the directory name (I am not putting a direct link to that because that is not going to be the final name and I’m not quite ready for it to be seen by Google, and hence customers, yet). 

Not a bad ninety minutes, actually, especially for someone who doesn’t really know PHP or CSS.  My remaining tasks are

  • get the blogroll and categories to look consistent with the rest of the sidebar (requires some diving into WordPress internals)
  • fix the sitewide CSS so that the top navigation bar includes a nicely bolded Blog entry on the right hand side
  • set Apache to redirect the blog’s URL to the wordpress directory (the real URL thus stays portable and can have a more SEO-friendly name than “wordpress”)
  • pick a title.  I’m leaning towards “Teaching Resources” for raw SEO punch or “Teacher’s Pet” for something which has a bit of style.  The title tag will naturally incorporate the words Bingo Card Creator as well.
  • get comments working so that they are properly skinned throughout the site.
  • oh, yeah, write some content.

I’ll post when the blog is ready for prime-time.  At that point, if any exceptionally generous folks out there wanted to put it on Google’s radar, I’d be oh-so-greatful.  Granted, it will be indexed almost instantly after it goes into the sitewide navigational layout but links directly at it from “disinterested third parties” will really help my SEO efforts.

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New Adwords Feature

Posted on September 25, 2007 by in AdWords

I’ve been patiently waiting for a while for Google to finally come out with CPA (Cost-Per-Aquisition — essentially, affiliate sales) AdWords for a while now.  They’ve got it in beta testing but that doesn’t help me.  The idea would be pay folks $10 or so for every copy of Bingo Card Creator their site *sells* as opposed to 10 cents every time someone clicks on over to me.  The idea is that that this would reduce the incentive to use scummy tricks to incite clicks.

Anyhow, Google recently released a kinda-sorta CPA feature.  They call it the Conversion Optimizer.  In a nutshell, instead of setting a maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bid, you set a CPA bid, and Google uses some black magic to decide what a click at a certain day, time, and website is likely to be worth to you, based on your campaign history.  (You’ve got to have significant campaign history — 300 conversions in the last 30 days, which would imply you are also spending a chunk of change on Google.  Given that I just got charged $200 on my card for AdWords ads and that my last charge was on, hmm, September 15th, I qualified pretty easily.)

So, being the absolute sucker for new technology that I am, I signed up my Content Network campaign for it.  Over the last month my Content Network Campaign has had an average CPA of 41 cents.  I’d like to get that back down to 30 cents, but for the moment for testing purposes I set my CPA bid to 35 cents. 

I’ll keep you posted with how this is working out for me.

P.S. While $280 (and counting!) of advertising expenditure this month is giving me a bit of heartburn, on the plus side, I’ve just crested $1,000 in sales for the first time ever.

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Deceptive AdSense Ads Worse Than Click Fraud

Posted on September 20, 2007 by in advertising, AdWords, web design

Much has been written about the dangers posed by click fraud on the Google advertising products, and how Google has taken steps to address the problem.  Click fraud, however, is only one of the ways for webmasters to defraud advertisers of money.  I will detail another way in this post.  The technique is already widely known among webmasters who use AdSense (and, indeed, sometimes I wonder if Google doesn’t encourage it).  If you’re spending money on the Content Network, you also need to understand it so that you can cut your losses when appropriate.

A bit of back story: recently, I bumped by spending on the Content Network up by 30%, to the “several hundred dollars a month” range.  As you might imagine, at 9 cents a click (bingo cards aren’t the world’s most competitive niche) this means I was getting a virtual torrent of traffic.  During my daily check of the summary statistics (a habit I suggest you get into after major changes to AdWords — in normal operation once a week is fine), I noticed that my click-through rate (CTR) on the content campaign had skyrocketed from 1% to 15%.

That couldn’t possibly be natural.  Remember, an AdSense ad is, by definition, being shown to someone who is at least partially interested in something related to your product but has not expressed any interest in being sold to yet.  (Folks on Google frequently have expressed an interest with their search queries, such as buy bingo card creator, which is why CTRs are orders of magnitude higher there.)  As such, you should expect CTRs to be much lower than on AdWords ads — dropping from 8-10% for a really good AdWords ad to about .5-1% or so for AdSense on most sites.

However, site design can have a major influence on how effective a site’s ads are at getting clicked.  Google recognizes this and teaches some of the tricks to optimize the ads (which, after all, makes them money): blend the ads into your site, place the ads where they are likely to be clicked, etc.  However, they have an anti-fraud policy for sites which toe the line, because using certain techniques to get the ads clicked on results in non-interested surfers clicking them, and that costs advertisers money and drives them away from the service. 

Since web pages are made to be scanned, anything that causes your eyes to be drawn toward an ad but away from its content causes your click-through rate to soar.  One previously common tactic, which is now banned, was to line up images with the advertisements in order to suggest to visitors that the links provided explanations for the images.  This resulted in quadrupling CTRs for the ads.  Since the AdSense equation is

Revenue = (traffic) * (# of ad units) * (CTR) * (cost per click) * (percentage Google gives you)

that quadrupled revenues for participating webmasters.  I’m strongly tempted to say “unscrupulous webmasters”, because once the visitor realizes they’ve been had they’ll be on the back button without a second thought, costing the advertiser money without giving them any chance to pitch their products to an interested customer.  That is, of course, the entire point of the excercise.

So that is the old scam.  Here is the new hotness: using CSS and HTML, organize your website in the fairly typical sections-broken-by-heads style.  Then, optimize your CSS such that the section travels off the page, with the clipping at a common resolution (800×600 or 1024×768) happening in such a way as to cut off the legitimate content and thereby give your visitors the impression that the ad is the content promised in the section headings. 

There are at least eight sites which are using this technique in the quite non-competitive bingo card niche.  I have taken a screenshot of one site which I thought was iconic.  (Editor’s note: After first posting this, the author of that site got in touch with me and said the placement was accidental.  I have no particular reason to disbelieve him, as inspection of his other pages shows a variety of ad placements.  I’m afraid that accident doesn’t explain the other sites, though.  I am keeping the pictures up to demonstrate the general tactic, but have edited the remainder of this post to be less accusatory of his site in particular.)  You really have to see it in full-screen glory to appreciate the effect.  That screenshot is about 255kb and shows the site in default IE7, but if you wanted to be really devious you can use CSS hacks to make it work equally well in all browsers at once, using pixel perfect layouts and a bit of elbow grease.  I have obscured the “branding” of the site, and have obscured the ads of my competitors to avoid associating them with it.  (If you happen to be a competitor of mine, drop me an email and I will happily give you my list of sites which are using these strategies, or you can make your own as described below.)

Here is a close up on the main content area of the page.  Again, you really should look at in in context — the actual CONTENT here is invisible until you scroll.  Unsophisticated visitors miss the distinction between the blended links and the advertisements (which happen to have quite similar titles) and click on the ads instead of the file links.  Click to see the expanded version.

AdSense Manipulation

Remember, the site does not actually show that content in the middle unless you scroll down to see it — and even with the content there, it is easy for an unsophisticated Internet user to click on the ads thinking they are getting the promised downloads. 

And click they do.  From my statistics, roughly 16% of the visitors of that page clicked on my one, single advertisement.  Given there were five advertisements, a click in my niche costs about a dime, and Google splits somewhere in the general neighborhood of 50-50 with webmasters, we can guestimate their revenue per thousand visitors using the above formula:

Revenue = 1000 * 5 * .16 * .1 * .5 = $40 CPM.  (Edit: The site owner suggests that he is earning $7.50 CPM for the site as a whole.  I don’t have access to his console, but I think my estimate is closer than his for pages which employ this technique.)

Sorting the list of the hundreds of advertisers I am paying, and ignoring ones for whom small numbers distort results, it seems like a more typical CPM for an honest advertiser in my niche is about $2.50.  So its fairly obvious why breaking the rules is so attractive — a single page with less than 1k impressions a day could generate something like $12,000 a year. 

And when I say generating, I mean “taking it from the advertisers”.

Most business owners understand the economics of advertising a product, but a brief review for the peanut gallery: I sell a $25 product, of which $24 is profit.  (It helps to be in software, the gross margins are quite healthy.)  The primary goal of having a user visit my page is to get them into the free trial of the software, which convinces about 2.5% of them to convert (i.e. buy), getting me my $24.  Thus, it is rational for me to spend anything less than $24 * .025 = 60 cents (at the margin) to achieve one trial being downloaded.

I have reason to suspect, given a year of data, that the attractiveness of my website and sales proposition should convince about 22% of interested visitors to take the trial for a spin.  Given that clicks in my niche cost about 9 to 11 cents each, this gives me an average cost of about 36-43 cents per trial download (it bounces around on a daily basis).  As 43 is less than 60, that means I am mildly profitable, with not too much room for error (if my conversion rate decreases to 2% and my cost per trial rises a few pennies I’m not making money anymore).

Bamboozling visitors to click on my ads hurts me more than errors ever could.

When an unsophisticated Internet user clicks on the “Create Bingo Cards” link thinking “This is step #1 of the 3 step process this website is pitching to me”, and then they are suddenly whisked to my very visually distinct site, they figure “Uh oh, something went wrong”.  And they immediately click the Back Button, to try to fix the mistake.  (Many of them probably click on a different ad instead, a mistake which is frustrating for them and great news for both the publisher and Google.)  As a result, it wasn’t 22% of folks coming in from these ads who actually completed a trial download, no, it was about 2%.  Which means that I was paying approximately $50 to get a sale of a $25 product — I guess I can make the loss up on volume? 

Oh, but it gets worse: Google is very, very smart about where they show your ads.  This is why they have a Content Score for the search network which prioritizes high CTR ads over low CTR ads: this maximizes money.  Google’s incentive is to maximize the number of clicks while minimizing the number of impressions,  because if they capture 100% of my budget then they want me out of the rotation ASAP so they can sell the inventory to another sucker advertiser.  This unholy, and I hope unintended, alliance of Google and the publishers using this trick sucked my budget dry within the first two hours of every day.  Google’s automated algorithms helpfully suggested I increase my spending by a factor of ten to compensate, so that instead of spending $15 a day to make $7.50 I would be spending $150 a day to make $75, for a monthly loss in the $2,000 range.

That Certainly Sucks.  What Can I Do About It?

1)  First, if you’re not in the position to routinely monitor your AdWords performance, opt out of the content network and don’t come back.  The scum sites are always one step ahead of Google, by definition, and if you’re not one step ahead of them that $2,000 a month loss could be yours.

2)  If you are in the position to routinely monitor your AdWords performance, use the Reporting feature in your AdWords console.  The report you want is Site Placement, for the previous 7 days.  Make sure you include the CTR and Cost Per Conversions columns.  Then, every day, grab your report in CSV format, and run a simple script on it to report all of the URLs where the CTR is higher than a threshold (I use 4%), the number of clicks is substantial (otherwise you’ll ban a lot of mom-and-pop sites for no good reason because 100% of their 1 visitors this month clicked your ad), and your Cost Per Conversion is greater than your profit.  (Almost guaranteed if you set your threshold right, because the only way to beat that threshold is to be exploiting your visitors, and exploited folks don’t make happy customers.)  Then, take any domain which appears on this screen, and add it to your banned list.

I am a Cygwin junkie so I do this with a gawk script every day, but if you are not a scripting wizard you can do it the longhand way, by increasing the number of rows in the visible report to 100, sorting by descending CTR (click it twice), and then visually identifying the rows that have significant number of clicks.  Then, take any domain which appears on this screen, and add it to your banned list. 

3)  If you are an engineer or product manager at Google, please, we could use some algorithmic help here.  I realize this suggestion is going to cost you money in the shortrun, but when advertisers lose money you will eventually lose money too, because they will stop advertising.  We give you all the information you need to calculate our maximum desirable cost per conversion (I have my doubts that we are intelligent in doing this, because you can use that information to screw us over royally, but business is based on a foundation of trust and for the moment I’m going to trust you).  You should provide a setting (or make it default behavior!) that ads stop appearing on any site where they transparently won’t be profitable.  I would also suggest screening sustained abnormal CTRs automatically for fraud or Terms of Service violations. 

4)  If you find a website which is abusive in their ad placement, you can complain to Google.  Realistically, I think they value algorithmic solutions over manual ones so much that you have zero hope of being heard (and they have to — they got to being a gazillion dollar company by NOT having to pay a human to deal with the little shrimp with the $15 a day advertising budget).  But if it makes you feel better, here is the link.

[Note: This post has been edited, as the author of the pictured site disputes my characterization of it, and claims that the effect was accidental.  As I have no particular reason to disbelieve that, and his other pages do not appear to be exploitative, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and have edited this post to remove accusations directed at his site specifically.  The technique, however, is being used by multiple sites and it strains credulity to think that eight people independently accidentally developed cross-browser compliant CSS and liquid layouts to achieve this effect.]

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CrazyEgg Pays For Itself Again

Posted on September 16, 2007 by in web design

Many, many moons ago I mentioned that one simple conversion trick is to put the goal for the page as the first hyperlink in the main content area.  This largely works because Internet browsers will almost reflexively jump on anything that is underlined in blue.    Anyhow, I was reviewing my printable bingo cards page yesterday (that one is a real link) in CrazyEgg and realized that the first textual link was to… Adobe Acrobat.  And they were happily profiting from my largesse, with 10% of the visitors to the 2nd most trafficked page in my site going off to download Acrobat Reader.  That was a moment of forehead slapping stupidity. 

I made a quick fix to include a link in the first paragraph to the free trial, and now approximately 10% of the visitors are banging on that instead.  Lets do the math: 8,000 pageviews for that page a month, 10% now see free trial page, 80% of visitors to free trial page download, 2% of downloaders purchase… that works out to be about 13 extra sales a month, give or take.  (Assuming the one day result of 10% clicks on that link holds up, that those clickers are equally motivated, etc, etc.  That estimate is probably on the high side, but work with me here.) 

Not a bad minute’s work, and it’s a minute’s work that is made much, much easier by seeing obvious visual clues like a huge dead zone on your heat map with a bright red island over a graphic that doesn’t even link to your own site.

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Its A Small, Small World These Days

Posted on September 16, 2007 by in Uncategorized

Now tell me, back in my father’s day, what were the odds that you would find someone translating the meat of a wee little article about a wee little company run by an American in Japan into Spanish?  I saw somebody link to me today, and was quite amused.  If you ever want to comment on or translate anything you see here in Spanish or any other language, please feel free to.  (Although if it isn’t Spanish, Japanese, or English I’ll have a devil of a time talking back.) 

Si los hispanohablantes estan leyendo este, por favor, no se vacilen hacer comento o e-mail.  Siempre me gusta practicar mi espanol y oir la opiniónes de personas en qualquier pais, particularmente las sobre software.  Disculpeme, ha sido como seis anos hasta que estudi el espanol y ahora no puedo escritarlo por salvar mi vida.  (Ni puedo escritar los acentos en un OS japones tampoco.  Lo siento.)

Terminemos con una nota positiva. Uno de los blogs que sigo sobre micro ISVs ha contado recientemente la siguiente y curiosa historia. Patrick McKenzie, que es como se llama el blogger y dueño de la micro ISV, vende un software para la creación de bingos educativos. Yo tampoco sé lo que es. El caso es que esta señora era cliente registrada (es decir, había pagado) por un software para lo mismo pero no podía recordar ni la clave del software, ni la forma de contacto con la empresa que lo vendía. Buscando en Google, había dado con McKenzie y le pedía si podía mirar a ver si por un casual el programa que tenía era de su empresa, en cuyo caso le pedía que le volviera a enviar la licencia ya que no quería pagar dos veces por su producto. McKenzie consultó sus registros y confirmó sus sospechas: la señora era clienta de alguna empresa de software para bingos educativos, pero no de la suya. El correo de respuesta de Patrick McKenzie a la señora no tiene desperdicio:

Me temo que no es [clienta] mía, señora, pero le adjunto una copia gratuita con mi agradecimiento por su continuado apoyo al pequeño negocio.

Desde un punto de vista puramente comercial, es un reacción fantástica: este hombre acaba de conseguir una clienta de por vida, y una clienta que a buen seguro cantará sus alabanzas en cuanto tenga ocasión. Leed el artículo, que no tiene desperdicio. Bob Walsh, que de micro ISVs también sabe lo suyo, se hace eco de la noticia.

Let me try seeing if I remember how to speak Spanish or whether the last few years has caused it to totally atrophy:

We end on a positive note.  One of the blogs which I know about micro ISVs recently recounted the following interesting story.  Patrick McKenzie, the blogger and owner of the micro ISV, sells software for the creation of educational bingos [sic].  I don’t know what that is, either.  What happened was that a lady has registered (i.e. had paid for) a software which did the same, but couldn’t remember the name [?] of the software or how to contact the company which sold it.  Looking on Google, she thought it might be McKenzie and asked him if he could take a quick look in his records and, if she had purchased the software from him, send a new license so that she would not have to pay twice for the product.  McKenzie consulted his records and confirmed his suspicions: the lady was a customer company making bingo card software, but not his company.  His response to the lady was not wasteful [not sure that is the most faithful translation]:

I’m afraid you are not my [client], ma’am, but I am sending you a free copy with my thanks for your continued support of small businesses. 

From a purely commercial point of view, this is a fantastic reaction: this gentlemen has just found himself a customer for life, and she is a customer who can be counted on to sing his praises at every occasion.  Read the article, which is not wasteful [same word, still not sure of translation].  Bob Walsh, who about micro ISVs also sabe lo suyo [idiom which I know I learned but have forgotten — it might mean “knows everything”], echoed the message.

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Preliminary uISV Survey Results Up

Posted on September 14, 2007 by in microISV

Somebody on the Business of Software forums took it upon themselves to survey 96 uISVs on a variety of topics.  The preliminary results of the microISV survey, primarily about demographics, are now posted on their blog.  While I think that most folks are waiting with bated breath for the sales results, anybody who does that much work for the community deserves links early and often.  (Hint, hint for all you bloggers out there.)

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One of My Competitors Owes Me A Favor

Posted on September 12, 2007 by in customer service

I run a small business which sells software over the Internet to people who need to create bingo cards, typically parents and teachers.  Today I got a nice, polite email from someone who had lost the code which unlocks their software.  (I sell the codes, and having one makes the software more useful than the free trial version.)

Unfortunately, my customer wasn’t really sure she was my customer.  She wasn’t sure exactly what software she had purchased, but “Bingo Card Creator” sounded pretty close when she found me on Google.  She said she really wanted to use the paid version but didn’t want to purchase it again, and asked if I could please check to see if she had bought from me before.

Well, of course I checked.  As it turns out, she probably bought from one of my competitors.  Most of us have quite similar names.  Rather than having her contact the Bingo Card Maker, Printer, Butcher, Baker, and Candlestick Maker, I sent her an email substantially similar to the following: 

“I’m afraid it wasn’t me, ma’am, but have a copy free with my thanks for your continued support of small businesses.”

Now, I can hear the skeptics going “Alright, when a small businessman starts giving his only product away for free as thanks for patronizing his competitors, he has finally gone off the deep end”.  That is not true — I’ve been off the deep end for years, and I love it, the water is fine. 

As much as this sounds like a very mushy lets-get-together-and-sing-kumbaya moment, I think it defensible from a cold dollars-and-cents calculus.  (And, if I’m wrong, I get to pull this trump card that says “It doesn’t matter if I’m wrong, there is nobody around to fire me for a kumbaya moment here and there”.  God, I love being my own boss.)  Let’s talk about those reasons for a moment.

Three Totally Heartless & Mercenary Reasons For Treating Your Competitor’s Customers Like Your Own

1)  It costs me nothing.  One of the beauties of the software business is that serving your 307th customer is, quite literally, free.  (Its that first customer who costs you millions… or in my case, about sixty bucks.)  All I had to do was copy/paste her email address into the website of my partner which sends out the purchased CD keys, mark her for a free copy, and tell her that I did so.  The action took less than a tenth of the time it will take to actually blog about it.

2)  It saves me from having to write additional emails to the lady, who I predict will require just one additional email (a quick reply to the thank you note I’m sure she’ll send), as opposed to the possibility of having to write several of the “Could you check under my husband’s name?” “No, ma’am, it doesn’t appear to be there either.” “Oh, I’m sorry for wasting your time.”  “Its no problem, ma’am, have a nice day.”  variety.  I do love writing emails to bingo players, don’t get me wrong, but the cold dollars-and-cents calculus says “End conversations as quickly as practical” and making people deliriously happy works wonders for doing that.

3)  I just made a passionate advocate for me (and did I mention it cost me nothing)?  Within the last twenty four hours alone, I spent ten whole dollars (half a sale!) bribing Google to pay the likes of myspaceglitter.com (and other, more relevant sites who are escaping my memory at the moment) to show wee little unemotional, unobtrusive text advertisements.  The goal of the ads is to convince largely uninterested folks to trust me enough to click on a link and give me five seconds of their time.  99.4% of the people who saw one of these advertisements weren’t even willing to part with the five seconds!  And it was still a smart business decision to do it.  Despite the fact that after literally 199 gratuitously unmotivated partially attentive listeners turned me down, there was one who said yes.  That one person doubled my investment.

Why wouldn’t I do something which is much cheaper than $10 to achieve something which is much more valuable than catching the corner of the eyeball of a disinterested MySpace browser?  I just, in all probability, made myself a passionate advocate for life.  Whenever she thinks of bingo cards, she’ll think of Bingo Card Creator, and whenever someone around her talks about bingo cards, she’ll talk about Bingo Card Creator.  Basically, she’ll be like my own personal Apple fan.  (And I didn’t even have to call it iCreateBingoCards.  Take that, Steve Jobs.)

At the very least I made someone’s day.  The story will rate a mention to whoever she talks to about her day today.  The chance of this getting mentioned at the dinner table or in the staffroom asymptotically approaches 100%.  Wouldn’t you mention it?  When is the last time anybody you did business with gave you what you wanted, for free, without you having to ask for it, and without expecting anything in return?  

This is what Seth Godin calls a “purple cow” — would you talk about a purple cow if you saw it?  Of course!  Its a purple freaking cow.  A purple cow is remarkable (in both the “wow” sense and in the “I am going to talk about that” sense) just by virtue of its rare charm and charming rarity.  Heck, its probably even remarkable if it didn’t happen to you!  (“Guys, you won’t believe what I just saw — a purple cow!” is a fun story to tell.  “Guys, you won’t believe what Jimmy nearly ran into today — a purple cow!” still beats talking about the weather.)  Purple cows are basically designed to go viral.  (Well, you know the cow caught something, otherwise why is he purple?  Ba-dum-bum.  Sorry, I used to be an English teacher, we have to surrender our sense of shame to learn the secret mysteries of the subordinate clause.)

Two More Touchy-Feely Bits (Indulge Me) 

1)  Karma.  Now, I’m Catholic and I don’t do karma, but I find the word karma helpful for shortening the thought that some combination of cosmic justice, happenstance, and community causes good things to happen to people who do good things. 

2)  I really do believe that folks who support small businesses, like my fellow software authors (and most of my competitors are individual authors — you think IBM is going to develop synergistic practices for best-of-breed bingo solutions anytime soon?), deserve a pat on the back when possible.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with doing business with big business, don’t get me wrong.  I have unrestrained admiration for several billion dollar a year businesses.  That said, there is something just a wee bit noble about helping the little guy when that is an option, and noble acts should be rewarded.  (I mentioned karma, right?  Karma, like charity (and forest fires) begins with you!)  Besides, any taste on the part of customers to buy from small businesses is a rising tide that lifts all our boats.  I don’t care whether its bingo cards or wedding seat planners or superhero novels, every little marginal step that gets taken to make Joe and Jane Consumer more willing to trust their credit card details with an anonymous little shop on the Internet helps all of us move our conversion rates to the next level.  Everybody wins.

And I really love when everybody wins.  Doesn’t everybody?

[P.S. If you liked my approach here, you’ll probably get a kick out of my other articles about customer service.]

[P.P.S. This article has been edited since it was first posted, so that it relies less on you knowing me to make sense of.  I also fixed some spelling mistakes and eliminated a run-on or three.  Professional pride, what can I say.]

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