Archive for September, 2010

Finally, the Perceptus Back Story Blog Gets a Personality

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Look above!  The default WordPress blue Kubrick header graphic is gone.

It was finally time to make this blog a little personalized, a little bit custom.  We actually get a couple hundred hits a day on our corporate blog – much to our disbelief.

The new header graphic?  That cute little inukshuk was one of hundreds of impromptu inukshuks built during the best Olympics ever along the south shore of False Creek in Vancouver earlier this year.

Some technical notes:

  • We’re using a child theme of WordPress’s default theme, this way, we should have minimal problems updating the WordPress software in the future. This page was useful: http://op111.net/53
  • For some reason the image size was wonky – our image is 760×200 pixels, but websites gave different specifications – maybe it depends on the version of WP?
  • We stole the curved border from the Kubrick header image, then knocked out the middle “blue”, and saved it as a PNG with a transparent middle hole.
  • The inukshuk photo was flipped, cropped, darkened, fuzzed, and generally mishandled using the GIMP image editor.
  • The images were all combined in Inkscape.

If the blog traffic continues to grow, maybe we’ll do some real customizations next year.

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.

We ask, do you “Like” Print-Bingo.com?

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

A quick note to make a public record of the date.  We’ve just added the basic version of the Facebook like button to print-bingo.com.  Why?  Why not.

Actually, this is a bit of a trial.  If we get enough likes in a short enough time, we’ll consider  building a better Facebook presence for print-bingo.com.  We’ll see how it goes.

For now, visit print-bingo.com and show us the love (err… like)!