Archive for the ‘advertising’ Category

Playing around with HTML5 ads with Google AdWords built in Google Web Designer

Friday, December 18th, 2015

I had to build a relatively simple HTML5 ad for the main client this week. I had previously built Flash advertisements, but even that was a few years ago.

This was sadly a frustrating experience, especially since Flash ads (which in end user terms are basically the same) have been around for over a decade.

I will not go into too much detail, perhaps, I’ll backfill this post in the future. I wanted to write down a few notes while this pain was still fresh in my mind.

Google Web Designer (GWD) is the preferred way to build HTML5 ads for Google AdWords. The sad thing is they don’t need to invent anything here, just copy programs that we’ve used to build Flash ads for years. Some notes on this “beta” product.

  • It will install without complaint on Windows Vista. It will NOT work properly though, many features fail SILENTLY on Vista. Admittedly, Google only claims Windows 7 compatibility – I was working over RDP on one of the spare machines in the office –  I didn’t even realize it was running Vista rather than Windows 7. The “Swap Image” and problems in the asset library come to mind.
  • Don’t even get me started on the quirks in the UI. I never could figure out how to move an object with the mouse, rather than create a transform. I ended up entering “pixel” values into the X and Y fields with the keyboard.
  • I couldn’t find a way to export a frame of the animation, for, you know, the JPG failover image that the majority of ad networks require for users that disable animated ads.
  • Misleading “template” choices. My first attempt at building an ad I picked one of the 300×250 templates that mentioned Google and something about remarketing. In the end, this caused me grief. My final file was not compatible with the standard AdWords upload… something about it being custom (forgot to write the exact error down). I eventually rebuilt the simple ad without a template, using the Google ‘environment’.
  • Resizing a file to switch from a rectangle to a leaderboard ad? Yeah, not easy. Actually, I never confirmed that I got this working – I may try again next week.

Google AdWords issues…

  • I use Inkscape for a lot of vector art work. GWD seems to use these SVG files fine in local previews, but uploading the “publish locally” zip file from GWD to AdWords failed in all my attempts. Worse, it failed with this completely misleading error: “Invalid file format. Make sure you are using a supported file format (.JPEG, .JPG, .PNG, .GIF, .ZIP or .SWF) and that your file is not corrupted.” I was using text that had been converted to paths, but I later tested with just an oval and rectangle. In the end? I made precisely sized PNG files. It feels so old fashioned, and I’ll be really annoyed when I have to resize the ad.

HTML5 Ad Notes

  • No, you do not need to include a “clickTag” with HTML5 on AdWords. This is not as easy to figure out as it should be.

Block ‘Download Now’ Advertisers in AdSense?

Monday, March 19th, 2012

We’ve been fighting (not literally) to keep various “Download Now” ads off of print-bingo.com because they confuse many end users. I would gladly block them all as a category in AdSense, if I could figure out which subcategory to block without losing too many “good” ads. But, until we have a good way to do that, we are blocking unwanted advertisers by their domain name.

I’ve searched the web briefly for a list of web sites to block… without luck. So, I’m posting our own list of misleading AdSense advertisers in this post.

This is strictly a list of misleading advertisers that have a big “Download” or “Download Now” button and a small amount of semi-relevant text. Many of these are offering 7-zip, PDFCreator, and other open source packages, presumably bundled with some sort of advertising.

If you find this list useful, please post your additions to the list in the comments, or at least post a comment.  If we know that there is interest in this list, it’s more likely that we’ll update it!

I believe that the owners of these websites continually register new domains, so this list will probably need constant updates.

  • wiseconvert.com
  • coolpdfcreator.com
  • facemoods.com
  • downlopedia.com
  • ultimatepdfconverter.com
  • wisedownloads.com
  • go-downloads.com
  • pchealthdoc.com
  • soft.foxtab.com
  • alwaysdownloads.com
  • vgamenetwork.com
  • adlsoft.net

We haven’t done it yet, but I suggest adding a border around your AdSense ad units in the future. I can’t see this problem going away, we’ve already purged these ads once.

Ironically, it was fashionable to color-match borders from AdSense so that the ads blend in just a few years ago!

Once again, please comment if you find this useful… and post your additions.

Update 2014-01-15: After trying to maintain a list, I gave up. These ads keep showing up for new domains and new AdWords accounts. My current practice is to log in once a week and block the entire AdWords accounts via the Review Center. I’ve probably blocked a couple hundred over the last 2 years.

Tentative Switch to Google AdWords Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Bidding

Friday, March 11th, 2011

We’ve run Google AdWords campaigns for years.  Currently, by far, our largest online advertising campaign is our Print-Bingo.com campaign on Google AdWords.  We do run ads on the Microsoft+Yahoo platform, but that hasn’t been worth the effort to work on optimizing, it’s hard to see any real ROI on these.

A couple months ago, Google offered AdWords users an incentive to add the conversion tracking JavaScript snippet to our campaigns.  With conversion tracking, Google will track which advertising clicks lead to actual sales, in our case, we are counting upgrades to Premium access to Print-Bingo.com.  In theory, Google will optimize our bids, both up and down, to match based on geography, time of day, search phrases, and potentially more, so that our cost per acquisition is optimized.  We still pay for every click in CPA; however, Google tries to get us the best ROI  for our clicks.  The alternative on Google, is the traditional cost per click advertising, where we set a maximum bid for a click and find some other way to make sure that we are getting a positive return on our ad dollars.

Since it was on the to-do list anyway, we took up the offer to add CPA tracking.  We’re glad that we did… probably.

We’re only a couple weeks into the process, and we’ve seen Google start to adjust the bidding.  Search ads do much better than the content network – we knew this already, but we underestimated the difference in ROI.  Our average cost per click is going up; however, our total spend is about even.  It seems that higher spots in the advertising have a better ROI. And our conversions are at least even, if not up moderately.

Note that we do have a couple months of tracking data in the system before we turned on the CPA bidding. So we are trying to  compare apples-to-apples when we count the number of conversions over a period of time. It is a bit worrisome, we’re putting quite a lot of trust that Google won’t try to cheat us; but what can you do… ROI is ROI.

There is a hole in this setup.  Print-Bingo.com generates revenue from advertising, and we benefit greatly from word of mouth referrals by both paid and unpaid users.  Since we are only tracking Premium users, we’re not giving a value to the free-level users that visit our site from ad clicks.

In the end, we’re tentatively switching to CPA bidding.  We might even increase the advertising budget if the numbers hold up.  We might add a second, parallel, campaign, aimed at getting cheap clicks from the content network… maybe.

 

 

 

Shaw email SPAM filters for shaw.ca addresses are mediocre

Monday, January 24th, 2011

 

Shaw SPAM filter catches a lot of false positives.

Shaw SPAM filter catches a lot of false positives.

I have mentioned my disdain for Shaw’s email at least once on this blog.

Today, I’ll write a bit on Shaw’s mediocre spam filter.

We manage a fully legitimate, opt-in email newsletter for a local retail chain. This client has a large (relative to the business size) email newsletter list.  The vast majority of the email subscribers reside in the trade radiuses of their stores in the GVRD, Kelowna, Victoria, and Calgary.

By a slim margin over hotmail.com, shaw.ca email is the most popular email domain in these areas, at about 25% of email addresses on the list. The list subscribers is heavily female; however, I doubt that this affects the ratio of  email providers by very much.

The point is that for a BC or Alberta merchant, your email newsletter effectiveness is highly dependent on Shaw’s hit and miss SPAM filter.  We have a test shaw.ca email account, and subscribed to dozens of opt-in newsletters.  For months we have built up an archive of all the items flagged as SPAM. And we’ve seen many, many,  false positives.  See the thumbnail at the right.  Everything that I’ve highlighted in yellow is a false positive, in other words, they should not have been flagged as SPAM.

The Bay, Beyond the Rack, indulgeliving.com: Your emails are being flagged very frequently as SPAM at Shaw.  I didn’t count, but well over 50% of your emails are being SPAM binned at Shaw.  Many other firms get caught, though, less frequently.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any real secrets to sell you on consistently getting deliverability into the Shaw Inbox.  We have tried a dozen different changes in how our client’s e-newsletter is delivered to Shaw, and the results have been somewhat positive, but definitely not 100% successful.  Even the much touted Sender Score Certification did not work.

In brief, since this post could go on for pages and pages:

  • Email users – I do not recommend ever using your ISP’s free email accounts.  They really don’t care as much as the firms that specialize in email.  I would not trust that commercial email that I need, such as an invoice or receipt, would get to my shaw.ca inbox.  I strongly recommend any of the big 3 webmail providers instead.
  • Email marketers – if BC and Alberta are important to you, watch your open rates by domain.  You might find that some email hosts do not like you very much.
  • Shaw – if you happen to stumble on this, could you please just outsource the whole email system to someone who cares?  Cut a deal with Google or Hotmail and split the advertising revenues and be done with it.  You know, and I know, that email isn’t a profit centre for you, so it will never be as good as the webmail specialists.

Note: I have written about Shaw here; however, I can tell from the email open rates, that Telus email SPAM filters are also quite finicky; however, I do not have a telus.net email address to  use for testing this theory.

 

Columbus Day Themed Bingo Cards

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

We’ve added a new word list for our template bingo card design collection, so, please welcome our new Columbus Day Themed Bingo Cards.

That  set of word lists is getting hard to browse, we’re going to have to improve the template listings page soon!

Also fitting for this time of year:

  • Canadians!  Our Thanksgiving Word List is alive and waiting for you!  Unfortunately, it’s a little American-centric, since most of our business is  from the USA. You’ll have to edit the word list to make it more Canadian.
  • Our Halloween Word List is getting a lot of search engine traffic – already!

Some other recent items of note:

  • If you’re a fan of Bingo on Facebook, look out for our revised Facebook advertising campaign.  We’ll see if we get an ROI on these ads this time around.  We tried Facebook advertising two years ago, and it was a dismal failure.
  • Our Facebook “like” button was initially mis-configured.  Whoops.  After fixing it, we discovered a whole lot of “likes” that were built up, presumably from the Share link that has been part of the site for years. Nice!

Thanks for using Print-Bingo.com.  Basic use of our bingo card generator is still free!  And an upgrade for the entire feature set is still only $10… for now.