This little tool has served me well over the years and as I was setting up a new Windows 7 machine, this was on my list of tasks to accomplish.  But, when I got there I get this nasty little message saying that you must have Outlook 2000 installed.  Now I know that I was running OutlookPCS on my old computer with Outlook 2007 so what was going on.  It turns out that when you upgrade your Outlook (and the other components of the Office Suite), there are a few little pieces left behind from the old version.  It appears that these fragments are sufficient to allow OutlookPCS to think it can be installed.  Unfortunately, it isn’t just a matter of copying on the fragments from one of the versions and I haven’t taken it any further.  So, I am now without my darling little tool.  Hopefully, I will be able to figure it out even if I have to go back and reinstall old versions of Outlook in order to “collect” these fragments.  Until that time, I just have to put up with not syncing my Contacts out to my folders.

What a bummer!  If you have any thoughts, please drop me a line so that I can get my synchronization back.

P.S.  The reason that this post is in my new SharePoint category is that I have been talking about this little gem in my SharePoint class because it is extremely useful to sync the Contacts from a SharePoint site into your Contacts list as well.

The other day, all of a sudden, one of my keywords jumped to 10/10.  Not sure why that one jumped (because the rest are sitting at 7) but I will take all the little favors I can get.  The interesting coincidence is that I just happened to be reading Andrew Goodman’s book titled “Winning Results With Google Adwords” and was reading the chapter on “Quality Bidding” at about the same time.  Maybe there is a connection there, maybe not but I’m not knocking it.

All of that said, this whole area remains a black art which is exactly what Google wants.  There are a bunch of factors that play into effect here and they are put together in some magic formula.  And, apparently, the QS is calculated on the fly so that each impression is based on a QS that for that specific impression.  Boy, does that make it tough.

Anyway, from what I am reading and what appears to be the case is that there are several factors.  These are the ones that appear to be used:

1. Relevancy – without a connection between your ad, your keywords and your landing page, Google is not going to give you any sort of QS.  What this means is that you need to have your keywords in your ad and on your landing page, i.e., the classic SEO keyword loading issue.  Just don’t over do it by trying to be tricky.  Just use your keywords in your meta tag for keywords and description as well as in your copy.
2. Historical Data – your account needs to have a history of strong CTRs.  This is not just the single ad or keyword but your entire account.  There also appears to be some information here about “bounces” where the user clicks through and then comes right back which would indicate a lack of user acceptability for the landing page information.
3. Predictive Data – this is historical data from other advertisers and their “viability”.  This is an algorithm that is obviously cloaked in great secrecy but there is a suspicion that the number of advertisers, their history including number of clicks and their length of use are all parts of the equation.
4. Opinion and Editorial Determinations – generally, Google is attempting to automate as much of their AdWords operation as possible.  However, there is always the option for human intervention.  This can work both ways and is not very common but is a part of the equation.

Anyway, that is what I have been learning and I hope it is useful for you as well.  I originally started this post two weeks ago but got pulled away.  Since that time, I have gotten a couple more 10′s but they are all in the same Ad Group.  Haven’t seen any other 10′s showing up but they will probably come.  In the meantime, I am continuing to improve things and am starting to see some serious ROI on the original campaign and a modified version that I just pushed out 5 days ago.  I am definitely starting to see things moving in the correct direction.  More on that later.

The first tool is a new service from Adobe called “Acrobat.com“.  They have had a web conferencing service for quite awhile for companies.  However, they are now offering this service for free as long as you only need three people or less.  The tool provides the ability to share desktops and have audio through either VoIP or a landline.  There are other functions as part of this tool but the web conferencing is the superstar, in my mind.

The second service is GoToMeeting / GoToWebinar.  These services are ones that I have been using for almost a year with the local PMI Chapter (Mile Hi) and it has worked very well.  As opposed to the Acrobat.com free service, these services have a cost involved (Adobe has a paid version of their web conferencing as well).  The nice thing about these services is that they are “flat rate”.  You can use them as much as you want for as many meetings / webinars as you need.  The primary issue is that the number of attendees is limited to 25 for GoToMeeting and 2000 (with only 25 able to speak at a time) for GoToWebinar.  The other issue is that there is no “toll free” capability.  Everyone that dials-in on a landline has to call a non-800 number.  Once you get passed these limitations, the service works very well especially when you are doing both VoIP and dial-in.  I just held a meeting the other day with folks from Canada, US, Vietnam, and Australia and there was no difference in the sound quality.  Also, the price for these services are very reasonable as well; just $49 per month for GoToMeeting and $99 per month for GoToWebinar.

The last tool that I have been using is “LogMeIn“.  It is a service that is used to access a computer from a remote location just like the Windows Remote Desktop but for any source and destination computer.  These service is similar to (I think) the GoToMyPC service that is provided by Citrix in the same fashion as GoToMeeting.  However, the LogMeIn service has a free option that works great.  The only limitation is that you can’t transfer files, hear sounds or print to the remote or local printers.  But, if you want to pay a price, you can get these capabilities as well.  I just haven’t found enough of a need for it but I am sure there are lots of people out there who might need it.  The service appears to work well with pretty much any platform.  I have used it with Windows and Mac remote machines and Windows, Mac and Linux local machines and a large number of different browsers.  I highly recommend it, especially if you are your family’s non-resident IT expert.

I have been using all of these tools and they work great.

In addition, I came across a couple of other tools that I want to try but haven’t gotten the time yet.  These are EverNote and BackBlaze.  The EverNote tool is intriguing because you can take pictures of hand-written notes, charts and boards and the software will (supposedly) do OCR and then index the images for search on your local machine.  They have an app for the iPhone (doesn’t everybody?).  Looks pretty cool!

BackBlaze is an online backup service that seems to be pretty inexpensive ($5 per month per computer for unlimited storage).  Sounds very reasonable as long as they stay around and you can get your data off when you need it.  As I said, I have not used these and don’t have a recommendation either way.  Just thought they were cool!

I welcome your thoughts about these tools and any other tools that you think are as good or better than these or just any tool you think is cool!

The response I got back from AdWords was interesting.  First, it was immediately rated at a QS of 7 (out of 10).  Interesting because that was the value applied immediately.  However, this morning I got up and found an email from Google AdWords saying that my ad had been disapproved.  Oh no, what is wrong with this ad and the keywords, they were very generic and I would have thought completely acceptable.

Based on that, I started looking through the ad and keywords to see if I could see some problem and then started reading the Terms and Conditions, Editorial Policy and all of the other governing documents (which are only of interest to lawyers because they don’t give you any useful information about this sort of situation).  The results were that I was completely stumped.

My last ditch effort was to see if maybe the link to the landing page was causing the problem.  Sure enough, when I clicked on the link from the ad, it goes to “Page Not Found”.  Now, I know why they disapproved it.  This is not really something that they want to support.  Why you ask?  Well, from what I understand, at least when you initially submit your ad (and any time you edit the ad or links for keywords), there is a check done that the domain is valid and that it goes to a valid landing page.  This is to eliminate situations where you insert an invalid or inappropriate landing page after the ad is accepted.

Anyway, fixed the link and sure enough, it was approved.  In fact, it only took about 20 minutes for the approval to come back.  This was a great lesson (another one) in making sure that everything is working correctly before submitting an ad, campaign, keyword, etc.  At the same time, it also pays to not freak out when you get a disapproval.  There could be something simple.  At least its not an account shutdown situation which has been happening a lot recently.  I am hoping to stay out of this scenario.

Take care.

One of the first thoughts would be that the Landing Pages weren’t working well and they were sending lots of poorly qualified traffic to the sales page.  However, when looking at some comparisons, they looked to be in good shape.  Plus, one of them was one that has provided good conversions previously.  So that was probably not the issue.

So, where do I go next?  I thought to myself, is there a potential that the impressions and clicks from outside the US were not providing the potential conversions that I was looking for.  From my stats, it was looking like about 60% of my traffic was outside the US and I didn’t really want to lose that traffic but if it wasn’t converting, then I didn’t want to be paying for it either.

So, I cut off everything except the United States and Canada.  Now, this is where things get a little strange.

After I made the change, my number of impressions per day has been dropping (down by 1/3 and continuing to drop) but more importantly, the CTR dropped from ~3.2% to 0.22%.  It has recovered a little bit today but still not up where it was.  So what caused such a drastic drop in CTR?

A little research has led me to a very interesting little bit of analysis.  What I have found is that I have a definite correlation between position and CTR.  Here are the results that I found over that few day period:

Graph of Average Position versus Click-Through-Rate

So, what this is telling me is that there is a strong correlation between “Average Position” and “Click-Through-Rate” but the sensitivity is a lot higher than I expected.  With a change in position from 4.4 to 5.9, the CTR has gone from 5% to 0.2%.  That’s huge but a very, very critical piece of information.  I am going to be adjusting the numbers so that I get my position higher and see where that takes me.

Good clicks to all!

In my way of thinking and experience, I have often said that PM expertise is generally transferable between projects, technologies and domains.  These specific experience job postings had me confused.  My epiphany was that the software world has tended to combine two roles that you will find separated in other domains.  Those are Project Manager and Technical Lead.  In other domains, the Technical Lead is the person who defines the technical requirements for the project while the Project Manager “manages” the execution.  These are two very clearly distinguished roles that are well understood in the more mature PM environments.

Just an epiphany that I wanted to share with everyone.

First, I found out that my landing pages were still sitting in test mode which meant that when folks clicked through to go to the sales pages, they were getting a test feedback rather than getting there.  Doesn’t make for great sales that way.

After I got that fixed, everything was cruising along just fine with good CPC, CTRs and decent hops.  However, I wasn’t getting any sales.  Isn’t that the point of this whole thing?  So, I got in touch with my mentor and described the problem.  he looked in his ClickBank records and didn’t find any hops from me.  Surprise, surprise!!! Why is this.

Well, after going back and forth a couple of times, we figured out that my links were not pointing at the right place.  I was going to a sales page that has one of the lowest gravity factors in this niche.  Oh well, it only goes to show that you really need to test and be very careful about making sure that the details are correct.

Now that I have everything fixed up, my two Landing Pages (LPs) (DIYSolarPanels and MakeSolarPanels)  are working fine and its just a matter of time before we see what the real results should be.