Sorry for the lack of updates, we are working to code complete our latest and largest Rails project: a free online dating site. Until we launch, I likely will not have time to write any blog posts. When I have more time, I have a wealth of things to share with you all!
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I qualified last week and am now an AdWords Professional and our company, Add Three, is now an AdWords Qualified Company!
Those of you who are managing AdWords media campaigns should seriously look into the AdWords qualification. The training program offers a plethora of information, some of it will even be information that is new to you! The training program is 9 sections long, encompassing everything from initial signup all the way to the developer API. To become certified, you must meet some prerequisites:
As an AdWords Professional Google will offer you access to the My Client Center, API access, the Qualified Individual/Company designation, and some other miscellaneous perks.
Learn more about the program at the Google AdWords Professional page.
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Need to find the subdomain of an incoming request? Recently I needed to determine the subdomain of an incoming request to properly format some search queries.
@subdomain =request.subdomains.first
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SQLite allows us to quickly and effortlessly get our Rails applications off the ground. Having used MySQL, I was used to formatted data queries . The first time I used a SQLite database, I was in for a little shock.
add3-imac:trunk jon$ sqlite3 db/development.sqlite3 SQLite version 3.4.0 Enter ".help" for instructions sqlite> SELECT * FROM users; 1|straight|man|Seattle|1@msn.com|1928-03-03|t|2008-02-21 11:40:05|2008-02-21 11:40:05 2|straight|man|Portland|2@msn.com|1928-03-03|t|2008-02-21 11:40:09|2008-02-21 11:40:09 3|straight|woman|Oregon|3@msn.com|1928-03-03|t|2008-02-21 11:40:12|2008-02-21 11:40:12 sqlite>
That is a little tricky to decipher…let’s try something a little different!
sqlite> .headers on sqlite> .mode column sqlite> SELECT * FROM users; id orientation gender city email birthday subscribed created_at updated_at ---------- ----------- ---------- ---------- ----------- ---------- ---------- ------------------- ------------------- 1 straight man Seattle 1@msn.com 1928-03-03 t 2008-02-21 11:40:05 2008-02-21 11:40:05 2 straight man Portland 2@msn.com 1928-03-03 t 2008-02-21 11:40:09 2008-02-21 11:40:09 3 straight woman Oregon 3msn.com 1928-03-03 t 2008-02-21 11:40:12 2008-02-21 11:40:12 sqlite>
That’s more like it!
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Wanting to be more Google-centric, I’ve reworked the mapping API on Seattle Condos to use Google Maps instead of Yahoo’s mapping API.
@location = YahooGeocoder.geocode("#{@condo.address}, #{@condo.zipcode}")
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After you have used MySQL to dump your database, FTP that dump file to an accessible directory on your server.
Once you have uploaded the dump file to your account here, make your way back to command line and get ready to import the file!
Now to import the dump file into MySQL, use the following command at your shell prompt:
# USER is your MySQL username # DBSERVER is your database servername, not always required # dbname is your database name<br># dbname.sql is the dump file you are importing # -p will prompt for your password mysql -u USER -p -h DBSERVER dbname < dbname.sql
If your preferences are properly set, the same thing can be accomplished with:
mysql < dbname.sql
Enjoy!
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Often times you will need to dump your MySQL database from one machine to another. Sometimes you can use utilities like PHPMyAdmin, but it’s always useful to know how to dump your database’s contents manually.
add3-imac:~ jon$ mysqldump -u username -p databasename >/tmp/databasename.sql
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I got an email from one of my buddies in the industy asking how to calculate how much they can afford to pay on a CPM for ads outside PPC using the performance data from advertising on PPC content. Here are some fictious numbers he sent over for the example:
PPC Content Stats:
488,000 Impressions
350 Clicks
18 Conversions
$95.00 Ad Cost
5.6% Click Thru RateAd Cost / Impressions = 1.946
1.946 * 1000 = 0.19 CPMDoes this mean we pay roughly $0.19 CPM?
The only missing piece to this equation is the CPA that they are willing to pay for each conversion. Using these numbers they are currently getting a $5.20 CPA on content ads. If they were able to pay $20 CPA then they should effectively be able to buy CPM traffic on a network like AdBrite for around 0.80 - $1.00 depending on the quality of the placement. I would just use this as a gauge and not be afraid to test out networks like DrivePM, MSN DR, Yahoo Class 2 and Advertising.com. Sometimes you’d be surprised running wider reach categories that your ad might perform in areas that you would of never thought of like Maps, Web Mail and IM messenger placements.
If you want to effectively test display banners you should have a budget of about $10k and should A/B test several ad sizes like 728×90 leaderboards, 300×250 square box ads and 160×600 skyscraper units. I have seen different sizes perform better for different types of businesses. You’ll want to get at least 1M impressions on each banner to get good enough conversion and CTR performance results.
Oh yeah, BTW “eCPM” = effective CPM for you acronym junkies.
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There was a great deal of buzz around getting your site listed on relevant news sites via press releases. Is there any merit to this? Hells yeah. Once you send your press release out o the wire there is a good chance that Yahoo news, Google news, Reuters and other aggregators will pick it up if it is press worthy material. If this happens then the blogosphere usually repurposes the release and takes out excerpts or references. Hopefully some of those references will be your website URL. The most common mistake that I see is companies forgetting to use an anchored link to their own website in their releases. Duh?? Many writers, especially bloggers are too lazy to strip this out of the releases and if they copy and paste the news then you get another inbound link hopefully from a blogger that has relevant content to your business or vertical. If you happen to have something press worthy enough to get to the home page of Digg or other social news media sites then it becomes a home run for your link strategy. Here are a few good press release distribution services and some of these guys even have SEO upgrades for releases. Money!
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MSN has recently launched its own Webmaster Tools (Beta) center which is similar to the Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer webmaster areas. You can register you website and sitemaps with them now at:
Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your websites. Once you have your site authenticated with a HTML tag then you can view a site summary, your rank on MSN, top keywords, top outbound links and top backlinks.
You can submit your XML sitemap for better results. Sitemaps help the Live Search robot find all of the files to be indexed. You’ll get the best indexing results by using robots.txt autodiscovery.
On the website status page you’ll see the date from the last crawl or your site along with the total number of pages that were indexed.
If you haven’t submitted your site and it doesn’t already appear in the MSN Live index then you can submit to MSN below:
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