Experiments with Google AdWords and Twitter
Today we launched a new experiment to promote MilestoneDocuments.com: we’re advertising on clicks related to “inaugural address” and “inaugural speech.” I know, it’s hardly revolutionary, but it was time to test it. Because we are starting with a small budget amount for this trial, we reached our click limit in just a couple of hours, so the promotion won’t resume until tomorrow. (AdWords divides the amount you are willing to pay over the coming month by the day to figure out what you want to spend each day, and then it cuts off the promotion each day after you’ve reached that budgeted amount. [How’s that for a mouthful?]) Then again, part of the problem today was that we had the thing set to the Google Optimizer, which selects the amount you pay per click rather than letting you set the amount. This was probably a mistake, as it charged us a fairly ridiculous $1.30 for our first few clicks. So I’ve set our own maximum rate-per-click now, which will give us more clicks each day before we exhaust the budget. By the way, we’re in the process of tweaking the design for the Milestone Documents site. You might already notice a new graphical header as well as new buttons for our MD blog and for “teacher resources” (itself occuping a whole niche that we plan to develop). More design tweaks are in progress, although a complete site overhaul (which we are itching to do) will have to wait for a few months.
On another tech-related note, a colleague recently wondered if I had used Twitter and whether I might think about it for the upcoming ALA Midwinter convention. I’ve long been skeptical about it but have been seeing all sorts of respected folks singing its praises, so I have established an account (@neilschlager) and will see how it goes. So far I’m not sure it’s anything more than a needless diversion for me. Perhaps it may come in handy on the odd occasions that I travel for business. We’ll see. I currently am following just 2 folks: Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media and Adam Hodgkin of Exact Editions. And my number of followers is a big fat 0, which makes sense since no one knows I’m on it–and no one I know is on it! So much for my reputation as an on-the-move publishing executive at the head of a growing global enterprise. (Tongue firmly in cheek.)