Does Google Apps for Domains work in China?

October 26th, 2010

Today I got a call from someone whom I helped setup with Google Apps for domains.  Primarily, he’s using Google to handle his email – it’s pretty much the exact same system that powers GMail, but under your own domain name.  We use it too for perceptus.ca email.  It’s awesome.  You can use the excellent webmail interface,  and IMAP for full desktop and mobile email applications.  Plus,  it’s free if you don’t need very many user logins.

If you have a vanity domain for yourself, get Google to host your email.  You won’t find anything better, especially for $0.

Anyway, my client is in China, behind the world’s biggest firewall.  And he can’t access his email.  His web requests get  forwarded to weird places. Ironically, he sounded rather pleased, since he’s actually on vacation, but it did raise some good questions.

Does Google Apps for Domains email actually work in China?  I don’t know, it might be a weird forwarding bug.  I’m not there now, so I can’t experiment with it.  If someone reads this and can confirm success or failure with Google Apps for Domains, that would be excellent.  Unfortunately, this is some info that I can’t seem to find on the Internet.

As an aside, in  trying to figure this out, I stumbled on  Google’s Transparency Report.  It’s a fun way to see if Google services are blocked in different countries at any given time.

I wonder if any of Perceptus’ websites are blocked in China?

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Posted in China, email, Google | 2 Comments »

The Importance of Customer Feedback Surveys!

October 22nd, 2010

We admit it.  There is room for improvement at print-bingo.com.   We still firmly believe we operate the best web based bingo card generator.  Period.  However, there always has been a long list of items on the to-do list.  In our defense, we never really expected the site to continue to grow the way that it has.  In many ways, features were put-off until the traffic justified the effort.

We decided that we were long overdue to start actively seeking  feedback from our paid  users.  So we did.  Obviously, we used our own hosted survey service, PapayaPolls.com.  Eventually, we’ll create a separte survey for non-Premium users of our site too.  Both will be updated and revised as we go along.

We’ve got a handful of responses so far.  While there are no clear patterns, the input is extremely valuable.  It’s a highly recommended exercise.   After all, shouldn’t all decisions be data driven, if possible?

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

Columbus Day Themed Bingo Cards

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.

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Posted in advertising, bingo cards, canadian, FaceBook, holiday, print-bingo.com, word list | No Comments »

Finally, the Perceptus Back Story Blog Gets a Personality

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.

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Posted in blog, blog.perceptus.ca, vancouver, WordPress | No Comments »

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

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.

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

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