Passing keywords, amongst others

Yeah, yeah. I know. I had taken a bit of time off. No good excuse. But, then, it is not like this blog is a life and death issue either. Hopefully.

All is well. Life is still crazy in the Silicon Valley startup land. The good news is that our performance for the past year has been so good that we are planning on starting a fund raising process. And, almost to validate our performance, some of the current investors are already jockeying for position with pre-term investment to help us ramp. Well, we will see how it works out.

Google is giving me a bit of heart burn lately. In particular, it has become unruly to manage and I am finding ever more lack of features. For example, I have begun the process of cherry picking the top performing keywords to their own campaigns with higher budget and dynamic keywords to make it perform even better.

That is the theory. But, it has not worked out so far. I am definitely paying more since the bid prices are many times higher than the standard campaign. But, I am not seeing better conversion.

Anyway, it is partly my fault, I am sure.

Oh, the Google Analytics account is finally turned on. I am glad. Of course, I still need to hook it up with Google AdWords to get the full details. I just logged into the Analytics account the first time about one hour ago and I am sure that it will take quite a few days for me to get up to speed and figure out what I am looking at.

This should be a good challenge.

**
So, I have begun to apply more pressure on the PR firm. They seem competent enough and there are certainly enough carrots that they have been dangling in front of me.

I have been pretty "easy" on them in the past month or so since it was the Thanksgiving/Christmas season. For one, I was not that motivated to work too hard. The other thing is that the PR firm has been saying the the reporters and calendars were closed for the year. May or may not be true but I was not pushing them too hard.

Now, it is a new year and I have made it fairly clear that I want to see results. They have had their play time already and it is time to earn their keeps.

It would be interesting to see how much can they deliver. The verdict is out but I want to give them Q1 to really perform and if Q1 is no good, then Q2 would be their chance for redemption.

Will keep you posted.

**
Here are some other cool undocumented Google tags. With them, I can tell the following thing when a viewer clicks on my adWord ad:

1. If the click comes from Search vs Content network.
2. What is the keyword match (if search network) or the site (if content network)
3. Which ad is triggered.

{ifsearch:keyword}{ifcontent:site}={keyword}{placement}&advert={creative}

Taken in their individual components:

{ifsearch:keyword}

If the click is from search network, pass the text "keyword"

{ifcontent:site}

If the click is from content network, pass the text "site"

{keyword}

Pass the actual keyword match.

*This is important* the parameter passes the matched keywords instead of actual key words. For example, with broad match, a search for "big shoes" can match the keyword "large shoes". In this instance, the passed keyword is the matched "large shoes" instead of actual "big shoes."

One way to address this issue is to scrub it against the web log to find the delta and add to the keywords list.

{placement}

This gives the position of the ad if the ad appears in the Content network site (I think, but I stopped using Content network a while back so did not bother to find out the details.)

{creative}

This passes a numeric string which is the ID for the specific ad. Using the ID number, you can match it with the actual ad under AdWords reports. (A rather clumsy process for users who want to optimize the content, but that is another issue.)

**
I am not much of a decorator and I was pretty resistant to the idea of doing office decoration. Mainly because I am too lazy to get involved. But, what must happen, must.

Everyone was assigned a task in terms of to-do and to-get. Then, we had a pretty miserable time in agreeing on a common decor vision. To be politically correct, it was an issue of styles and tastes. But, of course, *I* have the better taste and *fortunately* my style prevailed.

On the other hand, prevailing on that front does incur the issue that I had to manage the execution which was the whole reason that I was not keen on the idea to begin with. Not exactly a "winner's curse", but it felt like it.

So, the office is now decorated and I am curious to see how long we will keep it up. Good thing that the new plants are plastic. (Yes, I am cynical.)


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