We do one or two highly customized bingo card designs every year. They’re a nice change of pace, and often, we can re-use a little bit of programming on the live site. This time, we made a small improvement to the font size of column headers that are mixed lengths. That improvement will be pushed to the print-bingo.com site in the near future.

If you are reading this, and would like custom bingo cards to suit your own complex requirements, give us a call or email.

Anyway, this post will hopefully be picked up by search engines to help future customers more easily recognize a payment to Perceptus via PayPal.  We’ll eventually post this on our corporate website too.

We encourage you to try it. We suspect that it will help other users find custom bingo card generating website over time.  Then again, who really knows what Google’s plan with the +1 really are?  And… couldn’t they come up with something less gramatically awkward than +1?

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.

Here’s our design for Oscars 2011 themed bingo cards.

Based on the “Nominees for the 83rd Academy Awards” from the Oscars site: http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/83/nominees.html