Back in business

Okay, I am back in the saddle!  I had to take a few weeks off in order to deal with some other projects, customers and issues. During that time, I shutdown my campaigns because I knew that I needed to re-write my landing pages and I wasn’t going to get the time.  So, now I have the time.

I have re-written my landing page or provide more information and less sales “stuff” and I can see where that goes.  I started by turning on one Ad Group (DIYSolarPanels) and determining that the ads were still drawing impressions and clicks and they were.  However, I made a big booboo.  I have code in my landing page that tracks where the click came from and where they went.  In that code, I have a flag that sets the code to either production or test mode.  Unfortunately, I had a very sickening feeling yesterday when I found that the code was set to test mode.  I know that this flag was set since I turned things back on but I am wondering how long the flag had been set prior to turning it off.  This would definitely tell me why I wasn’t getting any hops to the sales page.  Oh well, it’s a mistake that would be easy to make and there isn’t anything that I can do about it.  Just have to move on but learn the lesson to check things before releasing them for operation.

One other note is that the process of testing things is really slow when you are only committing $10 per day to the operation.  At this rate, it takes about 4 days to tell whether or not there is a potential buyer out there.  Obviously, if the hop & conversion rates were higher, it wouldn’t be a problem.  However, I think I am running in the right area so its a matter of waiting around to see what happens.

One thing that I have learned is that Google plays games with their bids (CPC).  I am not sure how their algorithm works but it obviously changes the “Estimated First Page Bid” based on my performance.  I have been told before that you can get lower rates as you show performance (and that does work) but I wouldn’t ahve thought that the “Estimated First Page Bid” would change that quickly.  Oh well, part of the learning process.

That’s it for now.  Going to keep plugging away.  I will be upping my budget tomorrow because I am starting a new Ad Group (MakeSolarPanels) and I want to see how that one does.  Will let you know.