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UnknownA bunch of weeks ago I decided to increase sales for AdRotate using Google AdWords. I watched their marketing video’s on how cool it would be and how much I would increase revenue. The only thing they didn’t mention was the only revenue I’d increase was theirs…

Obviously the first 2 weeks were a disaster. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing and I my bids were too high. I burned through the first 50 euros very quickly. Then some dude from AdWords called me and told me I should use better keywords and had some ideas to start a “branding” campaign. Which I think was just a sneaky trick to up-sell ads. Since a new campaign also requires a separate budget, thus suddenly I would be spending more per day had I activated it as he suggested.

I didn’t know proper keywords at that time, so I kinda decided I would do that later. Then realized the new budget, next to my existing campaign and didn’t start the “branding” thing at all. Why? Branding is good… Sure. But I don’t know what my users want to see, and Googles advice for this campaign was “Use keywords of random items that your clients may look for, this can be as wide as cars, fishing equipment and airplane tickets”. In my ears this sounded a bit too vague to be useful. So after thinking that through, I didn’t do it.

I did however log in daily and spend almost an hour tweaking my bids, keywords, ads and all that fluff. I burned through 200 euros fairly quick with a “successful” campaign which yielded me 0% increase in revenue. I used tons of keywords which according to Google would have high traffic and were of “high quality”. Hundreds of thousands of impressions and very few clicks.

Then another rep called me in response to a Trademark issue with with of my ads and I asked her some advise to increase the usefulness of AdWords. She told me to make more campaigns with similar budgets (up-selling again?) and with that separate the campaigns to show only on their Display network (AdSense users) and the Search network (Google Search pages). I asked her why. She told me it’s her standard advise to everyone she talks to. Buuuuut, this contradicted the previous reps advise head on. He told me it’s best to keep it all in one campaign. So combine the Display and Search network in one campaign. She also advised me to change all keywords to a “narrow search”.

I’ve tried her advise too, lowered the daily budget a bit and separated the campaigns, changed a bunch of keywords and both campaigns are dead in the water now. No increase in sales, very few impressions and even less clicks. And no extra sales. And yes. All ads are in position 3 or higher.

So. almost €450 euros spent on something that yields nothing and apparently has no clear standard on best practises. If even their support/sales reps are not agreeing on what to do. I never saw one of my own ads anywhere because Google carefully prevents that. So I don’t even know if my ads are shown anywhere for real.

Your experience? What did you do to make it work? If at all…

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Last month I reported a problem to my acquiring bank for Credit card payments. About half the credit card payments I handle fail for a variety of reasons. They did a investigation and last week finally came to the conclusion that there was indeed a problem.

Their explaination

Basically what happens is that some credit card distributors give out MasterCard cards with Visa card numbers. Because the customer is not aware of this he/she will choose MasterCard (as per the label on the card). This in itself is not a problem as long as the bank can figure out where the number belongs and process the payment.

Due to a small oversight in the handling process it can occur that if you choose MasterCard the bank goes that route and from that point on will no longer take Visa numbers into account. If that MasterCard has a Visa number the payment will fail.

The payment failure can range from a simple “card declined” to a “invalid card” or even a “failed authorisation” error. Depending on the distributing party and what the acquiring bank makes of the number. In some cases the gateway stopped responding completely and a timeout would eventually occur.

They also informed that this will be resolved before too long but can be worked around quite easily. Simply by having to approach the choice of payment a bit differently.

The solution (workaround)

Send a different request to the bank. Let the customer choose a specific method right from the webshop instead of have the customer choose at the banks gateway. And for credit cards always assume both Visa and MasterCard.

Which is what I did;

omnicard-checkout-multi

 

Available very soon in OmniCard. Prettier, more secure and hopefully no more failures.

Note: No security is compromised and strictly technically speaking there are no flaws in the processing of the transactions. The bank in question is fully PCI compliant and with that adheres to the strictest rules possible to guarantee the security of your transaction.

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Over the past days I’ve been struggling with my PC to get it to work after it got unbearable slow. Re-installing Windows didn’t help and made things only worse. With the network throughput being suspect at some point I decided to poke a PCI card in there to “replace” the onboard network interface. After doing so I found out that the PCI slot didn’t work at all…

Fine! PC dead.

So I hopped over to my favorite PC store and bought everything new that was suspect. Including a new Mainboard, CPU and Harddisk.

Wanting to salvage some stuff. Such as the case (Cooler Master CMII Advanced) and almost new Graphics card (an Asus GTX670 DirectCU2) and some other items I took it upon myself to take apart the PC in preparation of the new stuff which should be arriving tomorrow-ish.

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wordpress-statsOver the past few weeks I’ve been checking some of my sites statistics a bit more closely to see where people go on the site. Where they come from and maybe how I can improve the site based on such numbers. One of the plugins I use for this is Automattic’s Jetpack (WordPress stats).

After a few days I noticed the trend where Google would send a whole bunch of people to my site from all over the world. Good. A few days after that I noticed that *every* language Google is presented in is shown as a separate site in my referrer stats.

So for the past weeks every day Google dominates my referrer stats rendering it completely useless to see where people come from. Why not just bunch all Google domains up in one entry/row so other sites get a chance to be visible too. This is kinda useless :(

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getthemessageA quirck I quite often ran into with Apple’s iMessage was that messages didn’t quite sync throughout all my devices. This in itself isn’t such an issue, but if you end up having 3 open “conversations” all with a few messages from the same person that gets confusing quickly.

Apple in part remedied this by allowing devices like iPads and desktop computers to receive messages sent to your phone number. But it turns out that the way you start the conversation makes a big difference also. By chance I ran into this setting and I’ve been trying it for some months now. For me it solved the issue entirely.

How to set up iMessage

To make iMessage start the conversation from the right “sender” is rather easy and takes only a few minutes.

See the below screenshots on how I set up iMessage on my Phone and iMac.

imessage-iphone imessage-desktop
On iOS: Go into Settings > Messages > Send & Receive.
On OS X: Open the messages app and click the “Messages” menu select “Preferences” and look in the “Accounts” tab.

The big trick here is that Apple likes you to be available via EVERYTHING you have. That means, every email address and phone number in your vCard and set up Email accounts. This is crazy. So remove all the ones you do not want to be available for.

I have several email addresses but use only one for iMessage. And my phone number is somehow mandatory. But fine. So 2 ways. It’s also important to set a default starting point on all your devices. I chose my email address as a default conversation starter everywhere.

Set this up on all your devices with identical settings and you’ll find that your iMessages are much more streamlined.

Tip: Some added security for your Apple ID

Since your iMessage ID is by default your Apple ID. My Apple ID is none of your business. And your Apple ID is none of my business. Having a strong password on it is one thing but them having to guess your username as well is just extra safe.
So do not use that email address for sending/receiving iMessage messages. Just a tiny bit of extra security.