Archive for the ‘bingo cards’ Category

Is it a good thing when you don’t notice that your AdWords campaign was turned off?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

We’ve run campaigns for print-bingo.com on Google AdWords from day 1.  Actually, we ran ads before the site was even on the print-bingo.com domain.  So, it’s been years.

We learned this week that Google has quality checks to make sure that AdWords customers are running legitimate websites.  I.e. they don’t want to sell advertising to scammers, malware installers, virus tricksters, and whatever Google deems to be low quality sites.  As with all things Google, these are highly automated processes. This quality score concept  makes sense –  I would be less likely to click on ads if there was a chance that the landing page was virus laden.

Apparently,  after our large edits to print-bingo.com in  August, we tripped the quality scanner and our AdWords campaigns  were turned off.  We sent a support request in to Google and a few days later, after a manual review, our ads are now running again.  Yay!  More advertising expenses.  :)

The strangest thing is that we didn’t even notice for two weeks.  We’re happy to say that sales are up so much year over year, that we just didn’t notice.  It did seem weird that we weren’t getting many (in retrospect, zero) referrals from Google AdWords that lead to conversions, but that happens some days, so it didn’t shout problem.

What’s the point of this post?  Well, actually, I think we’re bragging about our increased sales.  But on a practical note, make sure you watch your campaigns – I couldn’t find a way to get email notifications, but it might be buried in the interface somewhere.  You can always watch your logs.  Anyway, the point is, even if things are going well, it’s possible that they could still go better.

Technical notes: If you want to see when you’ve been visited by the quality bot?  Check your web access logs for the user agent AdsBot-Google.

Bingo for School

Monday, August 16th, 2010

It’s easy for us at Perceptus to know when school is back in session in North America. Traffic doubles from the lazy lull of summer at print-bingo.com!

So, here’s our annual suggestion for teachers around America and everywhere else, try our back to school bingo template – it’s our word list of school related terms. Or, you might want to try our Ice Breaker bingo template – it’s a great way for your students to meet each other.

Basic use of print-bingo.com is free. A cheap upgrade of $10 will get you a bunch more features!

Print-Bingo.com Updates

Monday, July 26th, 2010

It’s time for some updates to print-bingo.com, the best web based bingo card generator on the internet! Heh, we’ve grown quite proud of this side project.

It’s off-peak times for the site, since school is out and the sun is shining. So, this is about the best time that we can find for updates to the site. Expect little bugs to pop up here and there.

Please feel free to let us know if you spot something that’s not quite right.

Print-Bingo.com Works with Google Chrome Web Browser (again)

Monday, July 5th, 2010

Today we updated print-bingo.com’s programming.

The biggest fix, is that our site now works properly in current versions of Google Chrome. Our web based system for generating highly printable bingo cards is great… but once in a while we run into compatibility issues. For now, it’s fixed. We’ve tested in current Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Apple Safari web browsers. Ironically, part of the programming fix was related to a compatibility tweak for Mozilla browser from years back. Mozilla users, if you actually still exist, you will need to use a different browser to use print-bingo.com now.

At the same time, we made live a feature that we wrote for a custom bingo job a few months back. All bingo cards within a single run are now guaranteed to be unique. Previously, it was entirely random if a card was duplicated in a run – but it was highly, highly, unlikely. In fact, we programmed an email notification if the dupe-tester actually catches a dupe.

We had to hard-code a duplicate entry to actually make sure the dupe tester and the email notifier worked. The odds of duplicate cards that are randomly generated is extremely low – you can’t generalize exact odds, since every custom bingo card design is different.

The site has probably generated 1,000 card runs since the new code went live… and we haven’t been notified of a duplicate card yet. If we ever catch a dupe, we’ll be sure to post about it.

More code changes are on the way. It’s summer, traffic to print-bingo.com is lower than normal.

Fourth of July Themed Bingo!

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

First note, for Canadians: Happy Canada Day! Unfortunately, we have forgotten to create a custom word list for our own country’s birthday. It’s a bit too late to do it this year, but our Canadian Provinces and Capitals word list is a reasonable place to start.

For our American friends, the Fourth of July is just around the corner! It’s a great day for family to get together… and maybe play a little 4th of July themed bingo?

As always, basic use of print-bingo.com is free. We have hundreds of people using the site every day that way. But we reserve a few features for people who upgrade for the excellent price of $10.

Happy Birthday!