Zombie Bots Part Deux – They’re Back

December 13, 2013 By

Zombie Bots - They're back!Way back last year, I wrote about how one of my sites was under attack by some kind of zombie robot traffic – all without referrers, all reporting IE browsers, from all over the world, just coming and coming and coming, until almost two months later on the nose, the attack stopped, as mysteriously as it started.

Well guess what, boys and girls – THEY'RE BAAAAACK!

On November 12, 2013, the same site that was hit before started showing a huge increase in direct traffic.  It was, on the one hand, very similar to the previous attack, and on the other hand, there were some important differences this time around.

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Filed Under: Blood

eBay Says AdWords Doesn’t Work

March 18, 2013 By

Recently there's been a bit of a foof about eBay releasing a paper claiming AdWords ads don't work. Those of us who actually know something about the program believe that eBay's use of AdWords just plain sucks. I happen to fall into that category myself.

I give you Exhibit A:

Which ones of you bastards gave me less than five stars??

Which one of you bastids gave me less than five stars??

Filed Under: PPC Stuff

Shopping Carts for WordPress Suck

November 30, 2012 By

WordPress Shopping Carts SuckIt's almost 2013. Why oh why can't I find a professional, full featured shopping cart plugin for WordPress?

I have clients on old ecommerce platforms such as OSCommerce and ZenCart that I would LOVE to move over to WordPress (have you tried to SEO an OSCommerce or ZenCart site? It can be done but it's like three pains in each ass cheek.)

I have a full developers license for Cart66, which I can use for a couple of personal projects, but it doesn't support tiered pricing. This is a basic requirement of ecommerce, and it's positively ridiculous that they don't support it. Moreover, you can't find out they don't support it until after you buy it – the support forums for Cart66 are full of people who have been begging desperately for this feature for over two years – but the forums are only open to people who've bought the product. Megafail.

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Filed Under: Blood

AdWords Product Targets – Pro Tip

November 14, 2012 By

Now that I've gotten most of my Product Listing Ads tied in with AdWords, despite the hot mess that is Google Merchant Center, I've moved on to adding product extensions to all my regular AdWords campaigns, and setting up the targeting.

But I ran across something that was a little confusing (to me, at least) and I was unable to find any reference to it in the Google documentation.

When I first set up product targeting, I only put single target in for each ad group; we've been working on refining the feed and now that I have more targets to choose from, I wanted to expand our options for some of our ad groups.

After you've added a product extension to your campaign, and you are ready to add specific product targets to your ad group (the tab marked Auto targets), once you click on the green Add Product Target button, you are presented with a box like this:

AdWords Product Targeting Figure 1

Now, if you only have one target for that ad group, or just wish to target all products, everything's easy peasy – you just validate, save and go.

But you're allowed to select from up to THREE product targets, and it apparently makes a difference how you do it.

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Filed Under: PPC Stuff
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