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May 2007 Mid-Month Stats

Posted on May 17, 2007 by in AdWords, stats

Capsule summary: Sales have been nicely juiced by my crusade against usability bugs these last two weeks.  In particular, higher CD sales will likely lead to higher absolute sales numbers and slightly lower profits since I subsidize every one by about fifty cents relative to downloads.

 Through the 15th:

Sales: 10 downloads, 5 CDs (1 download refunded when they decided they wanted a CD instead)

Gross Sales: 399.25 USD

Expenses:

GoDaddy: $7

e-junkie: $5

CrazyEgg: $9

AdWords: ~$50 through end of month

AdCenter: ~$10 through end of month

CDs: ~$27 so far

Paypal: ~$7.15

Expenses: ~$88

Profit: ~$312

Visitor stats and all that jazz: they’re borked due to my website redesign, since I changed exactly how conversions are being counted. 

AdWords: twenty-two cents a trial download these days.  Twenty.  Two.  Cents.   (My ideal price target was 30 cents.)  I’m trying to tweak the campaign to increase number of clicks now because at $.22 it costs me about $7.30 to buy a $24.95 sale.  As you might expect, I’m happy to do that all day long.

AdCenter Actually Performs Quite Decently

Posted on February 24, 2007 by in advertising, AdWords, marketing

Volume?  Low.  Interface?  Annoying.  Work flow?  Terrible.  Cost per download?  Half of what Google is, and this required no tweaking whatsoever.  I’m buried under about four ads for places like Amazon which apparently bid on every word in the English language, but with no effort the following ad got about 4% CTR and, much more importantly, costs less than 30 cents per download it drives.  That is my target for reasonably profitability with advertising. 

 Print Custom Bingo Cards

Be ready in minutes using our software.  Download our free trial now!

http://www.bingocardcreator.com

 

 This might do a bit better if I did some optimization.  I don’t know if the time invested is worth the volume, though.  We’ll see.

Simple Changes Fixed Adwords

Posted on February 9, 2007 by in advertising, AdWords, marketing

Regular readers know that my AdWords campaign, which I spent a great deal of time optimizing back when I started my business, has been not performing well for the last several months.  I have recently fixed this — amount spent is down 50%, CPA (cost per marginal trial download) is down 50%, and conversion to purchases is now measurable.  I get $2 in purchases for every $1 on AdWords, as opposed to $0.60-0.80 as of a month ago.  I might be jumping the gun, as this is just my results from one week, but tentatively I think my tweaks worked.

What I did:

  • reenabled position preference.  For queries like “make bingo card” which I practically own, Google was happy to give me the #1 ad spot.  They then charged me about 15 cents for it, and I have an extraordinarily high click rate (something like 8 to 10%, depending on query).  That can end up burning my $3 per day very fast.  Now,  folks looking to make a bingo card are good prospects for me but not GREAT ones, since they may well be looking to make numeric bingo cards and they can do that cheaper elsewhere.  (If they’re looking to make cards for class on Friday, on the other hand, I very well might be the best site on the Internet for them, if I do say so myself.)  So I said, you know, let someone ELSE have that #1 spot.  (Position preference #2 through #10)  This let one of my competitors for the spot have it, and they get to pay 15 cents (or more, probably, since they don’t have my CTR for that keyword — most of my competitors, incidentally, are folks like Amazon who mass bid on every keyword under the sun).  I get the #2 or #3 spot now, for 10 cents.  It also comes with customers who appear to be more likely to convert (30% vs. 22% for trial).  Savings per download: 50% (45 cents vs 22 (!!!) cents).
  • Killed underperforming keywords.  If they had a CPA greater than my expected profit per download (about 40-50 cents), no matter how good I thought they would be personally, I nixed them.  “How do I make bingo cards?”, etc, got voted off the island (CPA was over a buck!).  My only remaining keywords are my A-team, and I need to see if I can’t recruit a few members this week (since my total spend now is half of what I want to be able to budget every month — heck, as long as its actually sustainably profitable it makes sense to increase it, right?)

I'm A Slave To You (Google)

Posted on January 24, 2007 by in AdWords, Yahoo, YSM

I’m a fan of Google.  Not a fanboy, per se, they can certainly do things poorly (see most of their products which aren’t search- or advertising-driven) and I wouldn’t buy the stock anywhere near where it is right now.  But as a business owner, they’re very useful to me.  I use Analytics to do my analysis of how my changes to the webpage are working, Sitemaps to make sure I’m doing decently on Google searches, AdWords to generate about 10% of my traffic and sales, and Checkout is getting a solid 50% of my customers since I rolled it out.  So that is pretty good.

What isn’t so good?  Well, to be perfectly candid, I’m dependent on Google.   Google properties send me 65% of my web traffic and account for over half of my sales.  That percentage is going up since Microsoft recently tweaked their algorithms and sent my ranking down for many of my most valuable search terms on MSN.  If Google ever tweaks their algorithms in a similar fashion, I’m 31 flavors of screwed.

So where does this leave me?  Fortunately, it leaves me with a day job.  Bingo Card Creator could close up shop tomorrow night and while I’d regret it I’d still be able to pay the rent, buy food, and save for retirement (although less than I am now).  But the idea of having my business at the mercy of one player who is not me is rather disconcerting, and since I have eventual dreams of having my business(es) be my day job, I have to figure out a solution for this.

Some options:

Diversify CPC providers.  I’ve been planning on getting AdCenter up for a while now, might as well start that this weekend if I have a few hours free.  I tried YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) before their recent update and the experience was beyond terrible — anyone know if they’ve improved?

Have backup plans.   In the event of catastrophic failure at Google Checkout I can be recovered in under 45 seconds, because switching to 100% Paypal would take me 5 seconds in e-junkie’s control panel.  (In the event of a catastrophic failure at e-junkie… I’m probably borked.  I have a script set up to deploy an eSellerate-based website at the touch of a button, but I’d really hate to be in that position.)

Improve Yahoo/MSN’s search marketshare.  Oh, wait, thats not an option because its out of my control.  This is really the crux of my problem: Google is an absolute titan in the organic search market (at least in the US, where most of my customers live).  If there were some secret sauce I could use to improve my ranking on MSN I’d certainly use it, but for equivalent rankings on identical search terms Google gives much, much better traffic than MSN and Yahoo.

Have more ways to aquire customers than search.  Well, I do get a sizeable portion of my customers from download sites.  Aside from that, I get some from teaching sites and some more from word of mouth among my users.  Unfortunately, when my users tell their friends to go download Bingo Card Creator, their friends Google for it.  D’oh!

I Am Oddly Motivated By Free Money

Posted on December 13, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, YSM

I read (through the indispensable PlanetMicroISV‘s feed from WorkHappy) that Microsoft wants YOU to set up an account with adCenter this Christmas.  So much that they’re prepared to stuff $200 in your stocking (in credit, naturally) if you fork over the $5 opening fee.  Ho ho ho, does that sound tempting.  I categorically refuse to use YSM again (“Like AdWords, except inferior in every way — price, performance, features, reporting, and workflow”) but maybe MS can separate me from some of my money.  I think I’ll give them 4 months at $50 a month or so to see if I can get positive ROI.  If yes, they get kept for the long term.  If not, its an experiment that costs me a cup of cocoa.

The Busyness/Business Continues

Posted on November 16, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, SEO, sight words

I have not had the time to devote to Bingo Card Creator that I would have liked for several weeks now, so I’m largely operating it like a vending machine — I collect the change at the end of the week and, once and a while, write out a two-paragraph email to somebody with a question. My sales for the month of November have been rather limp (10 so far at the moment, roughly 1/3 off my comparable stats from October and significantly under my goal), largely due to both ceasing all active promotion and not fixing problem with current promotions. I hope to fix that after I get a wee bit less busy with the job/real life, and I also hope to get version 1.05 shipped at some point, hopefully in the first week of December or so. Christmas parties seem to be a good opportunity to play bingo, right?

But enough kvetching. Here’s something interesting: I’m now fairly consistently getting 100+ hits from Gooogle per day, accounting for a full half of my traffic, without increasing Google AdWords expenditures (although I did tweak my account settings a bit two weeks ago). The biggest mover is my Dolch sight word list page, but that search string only accounts for 10% of the hits per day. The rest are looooooooong tail. My best guess is that as my website ages its way out of the sandbox and the incoming links folks put up age, I’m slowly gaining in the SERPs pretty much across the board. 5% of my traffic comes from that extremely common query with me being at number 9/10 on page one, and the rest of it comes from very uncommon queries (“How do I teach dolch sight words to first graders in Korea”) which I’m an insta #1 on.

I think this reinforces the importance of writing natural language articles for SEO. You can spend all the time in the world optimizing for a certain phrase and fight for every additional place in the rankings you climb. Or you can write stuff which is useful to your target market and rank naturally over time. Not instant and not easy but not complicated, either.

Sidenote: My new-found prominence on SERPs has resulted in me getting more downloads and confirmed downloads the last 48 hours than I did in some weeks. Given my usual sales cycle, I’m hoping that means I get some serious order loving come this Friday. The Wii is coming out and while I’ve got the money sitting in an envelope I would love to buy an extra controller and game for it.

Update on AdWords

Posted on September 14, 2006 by in AdWords, Uncategorized

Warning for everyone else currently a happy AdWords customer: go through your lists, look for words which are under 1% CTR, and *scrub*.  My best performing keyword has, over the past month, 1.75% CTR.  It dipped for about a week below 1%.  Random fluctuations, you would think, but Google responded by quadrupling the cost of it.  And even if I pay that for weeks to rehabilitate the keyword there is no guarantee that the minimum bid will ever go down.

AdWords Kicks Me In The Shins

Posted on September 12, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords

After finally achieving 30 cents per download (where AdWords is actually profitable) and keeping it there for a week my CPA creeped up again to 37 cents. Since I hadn’t made any big changes to my campaign and my market is pretty stable this time of the year I investigated what was up. It turns out that Google turned off half of my words in the vocabulary campaign, requiring a minimum bid of 15 cents for what used to cost 7-9.

This leaves me less than happy.

Some of the words were pretty borderline when it came to click-through rates, in the 1-2% region. Of course, they were also getting 3rd/4th position so I’d consider that decent. The other words were nothing like borderline: I got my cost doubled on “Dolch sight word bingo”, of all things, which is a) 6% CTR on a bad day and b) my landing page for that is human-generated and about as responsive to the query as you can possibly get.

It could possibly be eBay et al upping their CPC prices across the board (my only competition for AdWords is people bidding on gigantic portfolios, ranging probably in the millions of search strings), which means I just got priced out of the market, but unless their computers really like increments of 5 cents I’m guessing it was Google assessing the low-quality penalty rate. Which is indescribably irksome. I’ve sunk dozens of hours into optimizing that campaign to get it where it is, and I don’t think its even mathematically possible to make it have positive returns at the new-and-improved CPC rate.

Update on Ad Experiments

Posted on August 11, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords, Uncategorized

So you might remember that about a week ago I tried to have some fun with two AdWords ads.  We’ll call them “white space” and “poetry” for short.
Dolch Sight Word Lists
Free lists.
No kidding.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

Dolch Sight Word Bingo
Roses are red, violets are blue,
Bingo makes students love you.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 
White space is an experiment in two ways: it sends people to a landing page which does not flog bingo, but rather just provides a resource to teachers (Dolch sight word lists) and then asks if they’d like to get started playing bingo with the lists they just grabbed.  It also, obviously, sticks out against six other ads which use every one of the characters they are alloted.

Poetry was an experiment to see if AdWords rewards being clever.  So many of the ads are, well, blah.  Here’s my product, here’s 5 words of description, here’s my call to action.  Blah blah blah.  Marketing should be more fun than that.  So I went with some intentionally campy poetry.  And, hey, if it didn’t work I can always kill it in a week and not lose more than a cup of cocoa.

I’m not going to kill either of these ads, because the are actually pretty solid for being so new.

For comparison, here’s a fairly typical ad I have using the same keywords.  Its been through a solid month of optimization of everything: the landing page, the title, the text.  I was happy with this ad and wanted to make more of my ads like it:

Sight Words Bingo
Don’t prep for an hour. Be ready
in minutes with our software.
www.BingoCardCreator.com 

Lets call that control.  Control has about a 1.1% CTR for the same keywords as the other ads.  It has a 22% conversion rate, for a CPA of about 32 cents.  All in all, this ad is doing pretty well.  (Note: all of these ads are in the same AdGroup and use the same keywords).

Lets compare that to poetry.  Poetry uses the same landing page and the same keywords.   It has 2.13% CTR, and 19% conversion, for a CPA of about 31 cents.  So, essentially, it performs just as well as the control ad in terms of cost performance, but brings in twice the amount of clicks in the same time period.  This is great news for me, as it lets me get up to my target $3 a day advertising spend without shooting myself in the foot by investing money in non-performing keywords for the sake of investing money.

But I’m really pleasantly suprised with white space.  I expected white space’s conversion to be thirty-one flavors of terrible.  The hook in the ad isn’t bingo cards, its a free resource which is vastly more popular than using bingo to teach with.  And the landing page was an afterthought I cooked up in about 10 minutes one day to generate backlinks — surely it isn’t going to convert people that well?  Well, it does… 14%, which is neither fantastic nor terrible.  This leads to a CPA of 43 cents, which is well below my campaign average at the moment (although still above my target of 30 cents).

But whats the real nice pleasant suprise for white space?  The click through rate.  Something about the combination of “free stuff you can use” with the eyecatching nature of the ad draws in teachers like moths to the flame.  The CTR is about 5.8%, which is just jawdropping for an ad averaging in the 3rd position.  My best ad ever, which pitches my software to people who are searching for software with exactly my feature set, only has an 8% CTR.

And how much money did finding out these insights cost me?  At last count, $4.61.

Oh yeah, how much money did these ads make me over the week?  A little digging in Google analytics says… a hair under $48.

The next step is… improve the ads and experiment some more!  Ah, I love being a small businessman.  This is so much fun.

When Ruthlessness Is Required

Posted on August 11, 2006 by in advertising, AdWords

I’m not in favor of ruthlessness when it comes to customers, employees, or competitors.  Business is business, but a little bit of humanity goes a long way.  However, investments, on the other hand, have neither feelings nor moral standing.

Over the last two weeks I have watched my CPA (cost per action = what I pay to generate one additional trial download) go from $.40 to $.60+.  And, not being that involved with AdWords for a variety of reasons (“other affairs in other planes”, as we would have said in my RPG days), I didn’t see the culprit.  Until yesterday.

The culprit was one single keyword which I had added two weeks ago on a lark and forgotten about.   (printable BC, where BC are the first two letters of my program).  This keyword is pricey relative to a lot of my keywords, at $.12.  But I make good money off of a lot of $.12 keywords, such as, *cough*.  The difference was that this keyword was converting at about 9%, and getting clicked a lot.  I had a very effective ad for it, and the very effective ad was very effective at getting people to click to my site, and then most clicked right out again.  Averaging those abyssmal results with another ~50 keywords all performing as well as ever increased my advertising costs to the tune of 50%.

So I had two choices… make a better landing page or get out of that market.  I decided against the landing page, figuring that most people were looking for cards to print and just didn’t want to get invested in software to print cards.  And they were probably looking for traditional numeric cards, a gambling tool which my software rather deliberately does not support.  So I killed the ads.

In other news, folks have been asking recently on JoS “Does anyone get their money’s worth out of AdWords?”  I’m actually not sure I am yet.  I get enough sales from all sources to cover my costs, but I have not traced any of my completed sales directly to AdWords as of yet.  I think there might be a wee misconfiguration somewhere, because AdWords also doesn’t get nearly as much credit for conversion #3 (clicking the update button within the program, which verifies for me that the program was installed successfully) as it theoretically should be.  I’m wondering if it happening in different sessions is nuking the results?  But it should be cookied…

Bah, I’ll have to look into that later.  As it is, I took two days off this week and have some “real” work to take care of.

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