Tag Archives: Google

January 10, 2013 · 8:00 am

Advertising in this blog

I started this blog in February 2010 as theblogbyjavier.wordpress.com . Sometime later I purchased an upgrade from WordPress acquiring the domain theblogbyjavier.com (initially for 25 $ per year, a bit expensive, though comfortable), that is why you don’t see the wordpress even if the blog is hosted in WordPress.com .

Among the conditions of WordPress to provide free hosting is that no advertising shall be included in the blog. However, you might have seen some advertisements at the bottom of the posts along these years. “How can that be?” When WordPress mentions no advertising, that means no ads included by the blogger (i.e. me), but WordPress has been indeed including ads from time to time. This is made if the blogger is not purchasing the option “No Ads“, for 30$ per year. I did not purchase it.

Some weeks ago I received an inquiry from a British advertising agency asking whether I would be interested in selling some advertising space. I knew it was against WordPress conditions and this blog is not aimed at being a profitable operation, thus I would not accept the offer. Nevertheless, I exchanged a couple of emails with the agent to know more about the proposal.

The offer consisted of including a link behind a word in one of my blog posts (a single word in a single post). The link would direct the reader to the advertised company. This is what they call unobtrusive advertising (it is funny that at the same time, a Spanish leading blogger, Enrique Dans, also wrote a post criticizing this kind of advertising practices in “¿En pleno 2012 y aún con estas tonterías?“ – in Spanish).

The proposal for that single link exceeded 100 $. This surprised me. I had previously researched how much one could expect to earn via Google AdSense depending on the traffic of a website, and the order of magnitude for a blog with the traffic of this one was below 100 $ per year.

Once I had left the offer aside, I took a look again about advertising possibilities within WordPress conditions, and I found out about a new program: WordAds.

This beta program had been running for over a year. Bloggers could apply for it and they would be accepted into it if the blog met some conditions. I applied. Few days later I got the confirmation that theblogbyjavier.com was accepted into the program as I announced it in Twitter:

The reader, you, will find some ads at the end of some posts. The same that happened beforehand, as I had not purchased the “No Ads” option. The only difference: now, I will earn some cash out of them. I don’t expect (nor intend) that sum to be big, but it will hopefully pay for the 26$ a year that the domain costs now. I will further comment when I start to see revenues.

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June 13, 2011 · 10:00 am

Preferred employer both in Spain and Europe…

Yesterday I wrote about what was my dream job as a child: being an astronaut. I work now for Airbus, and for many people, that seems to be the dream company to work for according to some studies.

Already last year, I posted about the study made by Randstad which placed EADS (mother company of Airbus) as the most preferred one in Spain.

This year, the same study by Randstad [PDF, 1.5Mb] has placed again EADS as the favourite company for workers (out of a study including the 150 largest companies in the country), even though the sector Aviation placed only as the third most wanted one.

Apparently the 3 factors in which EADS led the rankings were: the quality of in-company education, the interest of the work performed and the pay policy.

Moreover, recently it was released another study, this time targeted to engineering students across Europe. This one placed again EADS in the top 3 preferred employers behind Google and Audi, and ahead of BMW and Apple.

The good news: EADS will be recruiting over 4,000 employees in 2011.

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December 28, 2010 · 6:02 pm

Impact of an AdWords campaign (cont.)

After my previous post was published, I had a conversation about it and received some comments. These made me think that it could be interesting to comment on the other 2 campaigns to gain more insight about how AdWords works and how useful it can or cannot be. First, let me share some data of the 3 campaigns:

  • Al Andalus club (Rota, Cadiz): had a cost of 29.68€ for 250 clicks, thus 0.12€ per click (CPC). It appeared in the screens 208,520 times. It used 72 words or combination of words, restricted to a circular area about 90km around Rota.
  • Standing Ovation club (Madrid): had a cost of 16.56€ for 59 clicks, thus 0.28€ per click (CPC). It appeared in the screens 166,291 times. It used 49 words or combination of words and was restricted to Madrid region.
  • Blog: had a cost of 51.96€ for 1,410 clicks, thus 0.04€ per click (CPC). It appeared in the screens 3,685,521 times. It used 41 words or combination of words and was not geographically restricted.

Even though I am not an expert in AdWords, from what I have experienced and as you can see above:

  • The more clicks it has the lower the price per click will be.
  • You may set a maximum amount of money you want to spend per day (I normally didn’t spend more than 1.5€ euro per day per campaign), this means that once that amount is reached your campaign is de-activated until the next day (ads won’t appear for some hours).
  • Using more words does not necessarily translate into more clicks. You need to find adequate words, related to the website, so it appears and appears high enough in the web. Also, some words are more expensive than others, though the price varies with the number of clicks.
  • The ads themselves need to be attractive, as it may appear many times but still needs to make people click on it. In that sense, the most successful one was that of Al Andalus (people clicked on it 0.12% of the times it appeared; 3 times more effective than the other 2 campaigns).
  • You need to focus the campaign in the segment you want to target. E.g., I first centered the area for Al Andalus campaign, until I found out that some clicks (consuming campaign money) came from Tanger and other Moroccan cities… I had to move the target area, as no one from Morocco would go to the club on a weekly basis.

I didn’t measure any kind of conversion rate as I am not selling anything through my blog nor could I check how many guests went to Al Andalus or Standing Ovation meetings thanks to ads (I was not attending those clubs); and that would be an extremely interesting indicator for any business.

Finally, my friend got the 75€ from a special offer from Google. In the Iberia in-flight magazine (“Ronda”), I have also seen some months ago codes for 50€ to be used in AdWords campaigns. So, be aware of possible next opportunities and give it a try (and you can always spend some little money as a learning experience – everything is very well explained inside AdWords tool).

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February 18, 2010 · 2:42 am

New marketing

Some weeks ago I attended the presentation of a book at EOI business school, “Claves del Nuevo marketing” (which can be downloaded in pdf freely).

At the moment of writing this post I have not yet read the book, though it seemed quite interesting: Eighteen different authors just gathered to write different chapters on their area of expertise.

The conference itself was quite entertaining. Two of the authors were commenting their views on metrics and on viral marketing.

They quoted some articles, videos and examples that I want to quickly refer here:

  • Article from Marshall Sponder & Cecilia Pineda Feret in Customer Intelligence, discussing the possible entry of Google on Social Media monitoring and what could this mean.
  • On viral marketing it was interesting the questioning of whether it really reaches that many people. We tend to think so, but does it really do so? Check out this funny video (in Spanish).
  • Another very interesting video: “Redes Sociales – ¿Revolución o Moda?” (the video is in English, “Social Networks – Revolution or Fashion?).

I’m just referring to these topics as discussing them at length would need many different posts. I hope you enjoy them.

That day, EOI was distributing the latest issue of the marketing magazine “Yorokobu”. I will comment in a near future different things I read there (e.g. 94wines…).

One last thing I wanted to share with you: my Lego. I had seen advertisements about cartoonfying yourself, but I found this one in the Yorokobu magazine even funnier. This is as close as I could get to myself.

Lego of myself

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