Archive for February, 2008

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Serialized Bingo Cards!

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

The best web based bingo card generator on the web is a bit better today.  We launched yet another feature to print-bingo.com, custom bingo cards with serial numbers!

We’re pretty sure this feature does not exist on any other web based bingo card generators.  We don’t follow the feature set of our “download and install” competitors, so we can’t say if serial numbers are available at all in that segment of the custom bingo card software market either.

Anyway, to the theory:  One of the weaknesses of printing your own bingo cards is the potential for anyone to visit print-bingo.com to generate unofficial cards to your friendly game.  Before today, our only suggestions for better security were to use special paper or letterhead that would be difficult to copy without prior notice.

To see what we’ve done now, view a sample of our new serialized bingo cards that use our buzzword bingo template and our newish 1 card per page format.  You’ll notice that we not only provide a sequential serial number that is tracked with our user accounts, but we also add a random string component.  Of course, serial numbers aren’t any use if you have no way of knowing if they’re proper numbers, so we add a master list at the end of the document.  See page 6 of the sample PDF in the previous link.

There are a few good uses for the new serial numbered bingo boards.  The sequential number is generally useful for organizing purposes.  The random section is useful for security and uniqueness.

As a reminder, we explicitly forbid the use of print-bingo.com for illegal gaming purposes in our Terms of Service.   If you choose to use our site, you take full responsibility.

Anyway, have at it, at print-bingo.com.

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Posted in bingo cards, print-bingo.com, randomness | No Comments »

Google AdWords Tricks for Canadians, episode 1.

Friday, February 8th, 2008

IMHO, Canadian businesses are at a disadvantage compared to Americans. It’s the little things that complicate life, especially for small firms that don’t have the time or resources to properly deal with it.

Today, I discovered a new trap for Canadians who advertise on Google AdWords to Americans like we do.  We advertise heavily outside of Canada, especially for print-bingo.com since the vast vast majority of it’s customers are from outside of Canada*.

The hidden trap? Competitors who don’t buy ad placements for Canadians searching on Google. Let me clarify.

Like every good marketer, I check my ad placements for a key search terms. Google is smart and knows that I’m searching from Canada. So it only shows me ads for businesses (i.e. competitors) that have explicitly enabled their campaigns to play in Canada. Many American firms won’t do this, so I never see their ads.

Long story short, I just realized that when people in America (and elsewhere) search Google for terms that we bid on, our advertising placement is lower than what I see when I make the search!

To test this, find a way to browse the web from an American IP address. I used a (private) proxy server. If you’re not that technically inclined? Ask an American friend. Or maybe find a free proxy based in the US? Or maybe hire us, Perceptus Solutions Inc., for a consult.

So, watch out Canadians. If you’re not checking, your web advertising placements in the USA might not be what you think they are!

Someday I’ll blog about a few other Canadian issues we’ve had, especially how we reduced our currency exchange fees last year. Hint: Google gives really fair exchange rates.

* Yay! I guess we’re an “exporter”!

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Posted in canadian, marketing, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

Valentine’s Day Bingo Cards

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

Another day, another occasion. Valentines Day, February 14th, is coming soon.

I’ve just looked at our website access logs for print-bingo.com, our web based bingo card creator, and I was surprised to see the number of people who are already searching the web for “valentine bingo” or “valentine’s bingo”.

We are continuing our series of blog posts about our great word lists. Here is a link to our template word list for Valentine’s Day Bingo Cards. It also serves as a great all-around word list for other word exercises that you have in mind.

As always, printing a few cards from print-bingo.com is absolutely free. Though, for some extra features, you’re encouraged to upgrade to a Premium account.

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Posted in bingo cards, print-bingo.com | No Comments »

Google AdWords vs. Yahoo Search Marketing, a perspective from the low-end.

Monday, February 4th, 2008

I decided to split up my previous blog post to pull out the pricing thoughts from the point of view of us, Perceptus Solutions Inc., who’s primary online advertising campaigns are for print-bingo.com. We sell Premium access to our web based bingo card generator for $10. At that low cost, we have to be careful with what we bid on for search engine advertising clicks.

Technically, we have ad campaigns for print-bingo.com on Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter. I say technically, because we spend about 20 times more with Google than we spend on YSM (formerly Overture) and Microsoft AdCenter combined.

If you search on Google for various bingo card terms such as “bingo cards”, “print bingo cards”, “bingo sheets”, and about a hundred other terms you will probably see a Google AdWords ad for print-bingo.com. Don’t click on it, it’ll cost us a nickel. :)

Yahoo Search Marketing has a minimum bid on any search term of $0.10. At 10 cents per click, it is debatable whether or not there is a positive return on investment. Thus we are highly selective with the terms we bid on. Because of this, we pay very little to Yahoo every month, in exchange for very few visitors.

On the other hand, Google has no minimum bid, and we can thus bid on a lot of terms that we don’t bid on on other networks. We pay for hundreds of clicks every day on Google and we definitely get a return on investment on those clicks.

To YSM and Microsoft: not every search term is worth $0.1 a click. We would literally spend 20 times as much on advertising with YSM if the minimum bid was closer to $.05.

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Posted in marketing, print-bingo.com | 3 Comments »

Yahoo Search Marketing Earns My First Blog Rant

Monday, February 4th, 2008

This isn’t a finance blog. However, coincidentally, I happen to be going over Perceptus’ online advertising campaigns today and I’ve just had an insultingly annoying experience with Yahoo Search Marketing. So, here is my two cents on the advertising network that on which Microsoft is bidding (along with the rest of Yahoo!).

Edit: I decided to split the post in half. The rant about the poor user experience with YSM is here. The search click pricing is in the next post.

Why this post today? I forgot the YSM password. That’s correct, we care so little about our YSM campaign that I haven’t logged on in months and I can’t recall the password.

Anyway, no password? No problem, right? Not so!

I Googled for the right address to log in to my advertising account. I searched for Overture (an advertising middle-man company Yahoo bought a few years ago) .

That takes you here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/overture.php

Click login to go here: https://secure.overture.com/login.do?mkt=us&locale=en_US. Note how somehow a link has pushed me to a different domain, overture.com.

Try my username that I have on file. It’s not recognized. Try the request a new password option.  Nope, it doesn’t recognize my username*.

It appears that there is no way to request a new password if you only know the email address that was used! You must enter both your username and email address to request a new password. Fortunately, I do have the username and email address, at least I thought I did.

At some point, I even managed to browse to a page that FireFox noticed that there was an expired SSL key error.  Not reassuring from a $40B company.

This was getting frustrating.

So, I go back to Google to try again from square one. This time I’ll search for Yahoo Search Marketing. This time I get to here: http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/

On this page, my username and email are recognized. Though, I still had to request a new password, but that also worked fine.

The moral of this blog post is that if you are going to change your website, make it utterly clear to the stupidest person, like me, where the current normal login page can be found. Putting a relevant hint on the login failure message would be useful too if I’m trying to log into the wrong @!#$@#% website.

* as an aside, Google uses an email address for logins.  People rarely forget their email address, even their old ones. We like that, so for all new sites we develop, starting with print-bingo.com, we only use email addresses for user account names.

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Posted in marketing, print-bingo.com | 1 Comment »

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