The loss of the testimonials on the top right of our new website design kept nagging me. So I discussed it with Mark, one of our web developers. And he came up with an idea to create a nice spot on the top right for one hot testimonial:
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Last week, I told you about the A/B split test I started, comparing my old website design vs a radical new design. I was planning to let it run for 2 weeks, unless the results after 1 week would be dramatic. Well, they are:
These are the results after 7 days (A is the old design, B is the new design):
Last Friday, I received the following email from InfusionSoft, the email service I am using for our newsletters and auto-responders:
We have received notification from several Internet Service Providers that your recipients are reporting your emails as spam at a rate which exceeds their allowed thresholds. In order to prevent any further spam complaints from your contacts and to protect your email sending reputation, we have temporarily disabled all email sending capabilities.
To restore email sending service to your Infusionsoft application and learn how you can prevent future spam complaints, please contact the Infusionsoft Customer Care Staff at the information listed below.
Google has a new interface for the Adwords system. It is still in beta and you can try it by choosing the “New Interface (beta)” link at the top in your Adwords account.
I have been using the new UI for a week now. Here’s my first impressions:
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The design of our website is being changed almost continously. I am always trying to improve its conversion power, by making small optimizations to the layout, the design and the copy.
But this time I am implementing a more radical change: a completely new layout. In the next couple of weeks I will be testing the new layout vs the old layout using an A/B split test. That is, fifty percent of new visitors will be seeing the old layout, the other fifty percent will get the new layout. Then we’ll be measuring sign-ups, downloads, sales and profits in both groups.
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I just received confirmation that I have been accepted as a speaker at the 2009 Software Industry Conference, in Boston (July 16-18).
The organizers were able to squeeze me in, even though I submitted my paper way too late (sent it in last week, deadline was February 28).
I will be speaking on Saturday afternoon (July 18), in a session about micro-ISV Issues.
Here’s what I will be talking about:
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Here’s a quick update on my Content Network adventures.
Up till now I have been using keyword targeting only. And I have been running Placement Reports to find “bad” sites, so that I could exclude them using site exclusions.
But now my campaigns have run for a few months, my ads are being shown on thousands of sites. There is no way I can go through and exclude the all bad ones.
I have removed the high volume bad sites which helps a bit, but there’s load’s of bad ones in the long tail too. Some of em even generating lots of clicks and thus costing me money.
(BTW: when I say “bad sites”, I mean “somewhat relevant” sites that are not performing plus sites that are simply not relevant.)
So now I am trying placement targeting. I am using the Placement Report for my keyword targeted ads to find good sites (based on relevance, number of conversions, clicks and impressions). Then I create new placement targeted ad groups to target just those sites.
Here’s my findings on both methods:
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Last week, I wrote about staying top of mind using a monthly newsletter. Reminding your customers of your existence each month helps to sell more software.
But what if you could remind them of your existence a few times a day? Wouldn’t that be great?
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Sending a monthly newsletter to your customers …
Isn’t that a time-consuming hassle each month?
And what to write? Do I have enough news every month to fill a newsletter?
Do I have to hire someone to design a fancy html template first?
Won’t my customers start complaining if I spam them every few weeks? I am already hesitant to annoy them by email when I have a new version…
And why would I send a newsletter each month? Why not just email them when I have something new to sell …
Sounds familiar? Because that is how I looked at it. At least, up until two years ago.
But now, I changed my mind on all of the above concerns, except one…
Which one? Read on…
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I had noticed some weird “no impressions” effect a couple of weeks ago, but at the time I couldn’t pin it down to a specific word yet.
However, now I am pretty sure that using the word “download” in your Google ad can trigger their “manual approval” process. Here’s what happened:
This Saturday I added new ads to a series of ad groups, for testing new ad copy. When I checked the ads a couple of hours later, I noticed that some of the new ones hadn’t received any impressions yet (these are high volume ad groups, so that was weird).
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