Google recently sent to me a US$100 coupon to return to “Google AdWords”: A year ago I used a $75 coupon and sold 2 shirts during that time. But spending $75 to make $10 wasn’t very persuasive [though perhaps neither was the copy in my ads….]. OTOH, RB can use all the ads they can [ie, they don’t do much promotion, relying on viral hits and mercy buys from relatives].
Searching Google with the search string “thorium t-shirts” shows my shirt first:
GREAT! — but my adwords ad does not show. In fact, no ads come up [?]. How many other ads would they have to target at this specific search result, anyway?
This screen shot is from earlier today, and you can see the second link going to zazzle’s search results for the word ‘thorium.’ Tonight as I write this it has creeped down to the second page of google search results — incidentally, this is Zazzle’s search page from that google search My shirt is on zazzle’s first search page.
Searching “vector tees” is surprising because I am first on that:
When I would expect RB’s own page for vector tees would show up way before me. Isn’t ‘vector tees’ a little broad, and likely keywords on many other t-shirt sites? Is using ‘tees’ vs. ‘t shirts’ really make that much a difference? I expected Threadless to come up way before either of us.
ANewKindOfWater
Let me know if the two images are not showing – I can see them but their pages are set to ‘private.’
Mitch Labuda
Using google analytics on RB? To see how people find your products?
ANewKindOfWater:
I put in ggl analytics back when RB introduced it, but its numbers don’t seem to jive with RB numbers; ggl’s is consistently lower. However it has been good for rating what pages get the most traffic [ profile page and the Assange/Haters Gonna Hate design ] It is also useful to see where people are coming from, which corresponds to what is shown on alexa.com — mainly 25% google search, 20% facebook.
AdWords has been irritating bc 3 ads I set up over a week ago are ‘enabled’ but not ‘activated’, so they run a couple times, but not the hundreds of times that should have happened by now. In the scraps in Help about ‘Enabled’ it says it is waiting for someone to approve them.
ANewKindOfWater
Update on AdWords: OK, Ggl finally moved my three targeted ads from “eligible” to “Approved (limited)”, defined here
All three say something like ‘Awesome Tees from RedBubble’ and may run up against their concept of trademarked items. A fourth one has a similar title and goes to my portfolio page. It has made the most money for them, but apparently the company that can scan half the world’s library and post it for free can’t seem to let me use the name of the company that provides the market platform for my designs. Whatevs, eventually the coupon will run out and I won’t buy any – they just paid themselves out of their own pocket to prove to a customer that they are ass-backwards.
ANewKindOfWater:
OK F that, I just replaced “Awesome RedBubble Tees!” as ad title with something more specific and keyword-related for three out of four ads, and now magically they are approved. A general ad with that title pointing to my profile page I left alone because it has best click rate of all of them [1.51%].
ANewKindOfWater
NOTE: ok I stand by the possibility that I indeed got the first hit for “thorium t-shirts”, but the second one may have been a case of online filtering, as discussed by Eli Parisier: