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

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.

Yahoo Search Marketing Earns My First Blog Rant

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.

Chinese New Year Bingo cards – in Chinese (sort of)

January 29th, 2008

Chinese New Year (and Lunar New Year, for some other countries) is on February 7th in 2008.

To celebrate, Print-Bingo.com has the following templates for you to use:

  1. Our Chinese / Lunar New Year bingo cards word list has been available for years.
  2. This is a great time to demonstrate the new Unicode multilingual abilities of print-bingo.com with our new Chinese Bingo Cards Example.  It’s made up of 30 of the most common Chinese characters.  You must select the unicode font before generating the cards best online casino.  I’ve just noticed that a few glyphs come up as “missing” rectangles — I’ll have to look into why that’s happening.

Enjoy.  As always, basic use of print-bingo.com is free, and your feedback is welcome.

One bingo board per page…

January 28th, 2008

In the latest in a series of upgrades to the best web based bingo board printing website on the web, print-bingo.com, we’ve added a one card per page option.

It’s funny how the website developed. It all started when I needed to “run” the after dinner bingo entertainment at a small fund raising event (the bingo was free, the dinner tickets raised the funds). For that, I needed basic numeric cards in an economical four bingo boards per page – the measurements have never changed since that original bit of code.

Later, when the site got modestly popular, we added the custom word list feature. Since longer phrases take more space, the larger 2 bingo cards per page option was born.

Now, the arguably long overdue one bingo card per page option has finally been added.

It’s a bit different from the other sizes. I’ve had users suggest using exactly square cells (which we’ve done), and to leave some space for their custom instructions or company letterhead (which we’ve also done).

For now, users wanting to do fancy letterhead or instructions will have to run their cards through the printer twice – I guess there’ll always something on the to-do list.

An outsider might think that the card sizes were added in the exact wrong order, but, as is often the case, there’s a story behind the situation.

Super Bowl Bingo

January 19th, 2008

Super Bowl XLII is on Feb. 3rd, 2008.

Our template bingo word list for Super Bowl bingo cards is probably one of the first we ever put together. You’ll find the list on print-bingo.com. All you need to do to create your free printable cards is click submit a couple times and our custom PDF for you will appear.

As always, you can customize the cards so that you have exactly the terms you want.

The word list is not specific to 2008, so you might want to insert a few extra terms like “New England Patriots”, “XLII”, “Arizona”, or “Giants”.

So, go build your customized Bowl bingo boards starting from our list on print-bingo.com.

PS: We’ve added some new code to the site – the new ‘autofit’ option will shrink the text of long terms so that they will fit into the cells nicely.

Update 2009-01-11: updated the links.