Tag Archives: fail

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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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imagesYou know, that site where people accept each other in their “connections” without ever talking. Where peoples worth is valued on how many connections they have and not on the contents of their profiles. Where the profile feed (or whatever that thing with updates is called) is so full of irrelevant stuff that it’s beyond useless. Where you are constantly talked into upgrading to a pricey monthly fee for no useful extras and where product pages are skewered so badly that I’ve decided to rather not list any more or my products on it than have Linkedin “promote” them.

Groups

The groups I joined, some with several thousand members, are quiet. The few discussions that do pop-up occasionally are about self promoting “I’ve launched this site/product/idea, what do you think?” or are about support/tech related things that belong on a forum for the product/item.

And since everyone does that, I thought; “well that could be useful.” So I’ve put some stuff out there. My recent OmniCard plugin for example. This was last week, so far I got 3 pageviews from Linkedin and Linkedin even imported the wrong url into the post which I couldn’t correct afterwards. So the only reaction on my “discussion” was me, correcting the link. I got a few profile views. But again, nobody clicked my link.

Skills & Reviews

I did get some good reviews from people I’ve worked with or for. But only after Linkedin prompted me to ask for them.
I did get some of my skills endorsed. But only after Linkedin asked others to do so.

Where is the initiative here.

And the other way around, nobody really asked me for a review. But neither do I feel inclined to write any. There is no incentive.
I endorsed a bunch of skills, sometimes I remove a few of them because I know the person doesn’t know shit about that. But I’m sure many just click “endorse” to get rid of the question.

My Profile

I like to think that my profile is fairly complete and more importantly, true. But what’s the point if no one reads it and nobody acts on it. You may as well go to my real profile immediately and skip the Linkedin “experience.” Inmail is not free. But contacting me via my own site is… So why bother with Linkedin.

Luckily I’m in the somewhat “privileged” position that I do not need Linkedin to get me work so the lack of visibility and initiative isn’t a big deal for me. But imagine I would expect to find work, a proper day-job on there. I’d be pretty disappointed.

Product & Business pages

Maybe I’m missing something here other than an intuitive setup. I’ve made a business page on Linkedin a while ago. It looks like crap. It’s bland, boring and doesn’t invite people to contact me. I can’t really see a way to improve that.

Product pages are worse. Take the AdRotate page or Omnicard page for example. The logo… I uploaded a carefully made logo in high resolution. Look what Linkedin did to it. Pixelated and unreadable. And again, it’s a boring bland page which doesn’t invite the viewer to use the product.

Conclusion

With the growing number of people looking for work and the image that Linkedin has where “professionals” find work on there everybody now uses Linkedin. This made Linkedin into the new Facebook. Filled with uselessness and garbage.

And I’m guilty, too. This post goes on the Linkedin feed adding to the fluff. And I have a bunch of people in my connections I never talk to and so on.

A few exceptions aside of course. But overall, Linkedin has been fairly useless for me.

Note: This article is based on my experience with Linkedin and what I hear around me from other people. This article does not necessarily reflect the experience of others.

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Over the past year we’ve had our share with internet slowness, phone outages and whatnot. Our internet providers help desk never was able to find it and had solutions like upgrading our package to get a different signal, new modem, blaming Apple, replace cables… All the default stuff.

On my own I have replaced both Airport Extremes, bought new switches, new server hardware, endless reconfiguring and resetting of devices.

In the past month or so the speeds were so bad we *actually* made a fuss and demanded that some expert come take a look at it. So they send over a technician. After a 5 minute streak of mumbling and following cables he concluded that my Airport Extreme was the culprit. Explained me how it was not the Internet providers fault and left.

Obviously that didn’t solve the problem for us. So I called support again and got through to their tier 2 support who said they would run some tests. If I could monitor when it was slow, note the time and ping the site we were trying to reach and write that down too. That sounded constructive. We set a date to talk over the results of that a week later.

So we did. Meanwhile the issue had been bumped to tier 3 support because “something was fluctuating the signal” which was cause for some alarm apparently. 2 days ago the Tier 3 guy called, asked me for the results. He also shared his results. Seeing spikes in our signal every so much seconds. If I could confirm this with a endless ping from my end to various points on my network and the internet. We did and indeed saw the spikes on my end too.

If I could go into my modem and restart it, he told me the address 192.168.1.1 or something. To which I replied that I had changed it to 10.0.0.1 to coincide with my network and avoid conflicts with VPN connections to clients.

ohhhh, but that’s a problem!

uh oh…

“Why?” I asked.
His reply; “Well, our VOIP system runs on that segment.”
“But how does that conflict? Does the router run on linux?” I ask.
“Yes, at the core it’s a basic linux OS.” He says.

And that’s it then. As some of you may know. Linux/Unix systems always have trouble separating interfaces which run on the same/similar IP address ranges and what’s worse in the same size subnet. Thus, creates a addressing conflict. Causing phone outages in that network (not just our phone apparently) and every time an address conflict popped up, which was every minute or so, there would be a spike in our Internet signal.

So as a test we reset the modem to factory defaults. And *poof* no more spikes and a much more stable signal. Sooo I was kindly advised to reconfigure my network to something that doesn’t conflict with their stuff. Which I did and things seem better so far.

Now hope it actually works faster… But for now it seems resolved :) yay!

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That’s right. At the Rabobank they must have made a board meeting at some point and one of the guys suddenly jumps up and shouts “I’VE GOT IT!” Where the rest of the attendees look up shocked and bewildered. “Got what?” one asks.

“Let’s make an appealing product for customers. Something that no other bank does. Something amazing! Let’s make it cheap too. So people join us even easier.” The excited board member exclaims. The others cheer and one suggests; “But let’s give them the worst of the worst product and procedure at the same time.”

And so they did…

Their site promises easy everything. Credit Card, iDeal, Maestro support. Active and supportive helpdesk and what’s more. It’s not too expensive, too.

Sounds good yea?

February 15

Applied for their payment gateway.

February 18

Received my contracts, confirmations and all paperwork accepting me into their iDeal program… Wait, what? No Credit cards? Calling their service desk they told me “Credit Cards are not allowed for IT businesses”. That’s a big vague isn’t it. And why is my company name suddenly different.

February 20

Emailed them, again asking them to correct my contact details. Yes, they had linked me to someone else’s website. A client of mine, for which I am technical contact.

February 25

Called them, again asking them to rectify my contact details and why I could not accept Credit cards. They explained I was put in a “high risk category” and thus would not be eligible to accept Credit cards. Also, since my own account was relatively new I would be linked to my clients account for the first month. Yeah don’t even ask…

February 28

After some discussion it turns out that Visa and MasterCard decided that my business was in a “high risk category” and declined my application for Credit Card payments. I argued that this decision (and reasoning) made no sense and wanted this up for discussion with a manager or higher-up-someone to sort this out. No manager was available. If they could call me back. Sure, whatever, hurry up already!

March 5

They called me back apologising for their mistake, there was some sort of miscommunication about my payment methods internally and their approval thing gave ambiguous instructions which suggested that only iDeal should be activated. But… She had taken care of it and all I had to do was accept and activate the current iDeal contract then once that was set up apply for an extension to add Credit Card payments.

So basically, she did nothing. And it makes me think they forgot about it altogether. Anyway, I sent in the contract the same day.

March 15

Confirmation that my contract has been received.

March 18

My contract has been activated and is ready to go. I promptly apply for the Credit card payments and added a second site to the contract.

March 21

Email confirmation that my extensions have been approved and I will receive the extension contracts soon.

March 22-ish

I’ve received 24 pages of Visa and MasterCard rules telling me about everything they would not do for me and how much I would pay them etc. Which I sent back promptly.

March 26

I received emails telling me everything was in order and activated and ready to go. Login details would be sent to me shortly. Great. Finally!

March 28

Finally the emails with my login details come in. But they account does not work. Trusting nothing these idiots do I emailed them asking them to confirm if Credit card payments were now active and for both my websites. Since the emails didn’t specify that. Also I asked why my account is not working. To which they answered I should call them.

Calling them the next day around 2pm I was told by a computer they were closed but could be reached on business days between 8am and 8pm. Uhh… Ok.

March 30

Today I called again. And actually got someone on the phone. I asked him if he could confirm that Credit cards were now active and ready to go. After some dicking around in the system he told me that my 2 websites were conflicting in their system or something. iDeal was not activated. Credit cards would take another 3-4 weeks and that he didn’t understand their mess. If he could call me back…

He called back an hour or so later confirming that indeed iDeal was not active but should be in a few days. He again explained that Credit cards take up to 3 weeks to activate. To which I angrily reacted that they told me in their emails 2 days ago that everything was active and ready. “Yes, our communication could be a bit more transparent.” No shit…

Conclusion (Intermission rather…)

So, still no credit cards. Neither of my sites can accept *any* payment through their site after 6 weeks of pointing out their issues and flaws and still they can’t set up my account properly. How hard can it be to activate an account and link some payment methods to it dammit!

And every time I tell them something is wrong they use the excuse “Omnikassa is a new product, we’re still polishing some procedures”. No it’s not new. It been available for over a year! It doesn’t take that long to send emails with the right information, or without spelling errors for that matter. It doesn’t take a year to “iron out kinks” in account procedures you do every day. Especially not glaring dumdums like this.

If they weren’t the only ones who had accepted me for this stuff I would have given up weeks ago…

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Yea, who ever thought of the brilliant plan that “single player” is now “online player” and you *MUST* play online even if you don’t play online, should be shot in the face.

And IF you want to force people to play online atleast put up *more* than 16 servers worldwide…. What are you thinking EA. I’ve been waiting for Sim City for months. Pre-ordered it and all. And now I can finally download it only to be told that there is no space for me on the servers, they’re all busy and and I’m queued? Screw you! It’s single player! That means OFFLINE – Stop forcing me to queue up for shit I don’t care about. Idiots.