Paul Benetis Dot Com » Rants

I Don’t Undertand Google

Paul Benetis — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:55:48 +0000

I am running an Adwords campaign for one of my sites to drive some traffic to it. The keyword I am bidding currently has no competition, it is in my ad, and all over the place on the site.Â Since my ad is very relevant to my site and there is no competition for that specific keyword, I was assuming that my cost per click will be very minimal.Â I learned that Google doesn’t see it that way.

I started out bidding .20 per click because thats what I needed to in order for the ad to show up. I thought that was a bit pricey considering I had no competition. Either way, I had no choice. After not even 20 minutes, clicks started coming in and my CTR was very decent. So I lowered my max bid to .10 which was a relief because paying .20 for as many clicks as I was getting, was becoming too expensive. My CTR kept steady and I still had no competition. I decided to drop my bid again to .05, which lasted for a good hour until Adwords raised my minimum bid back up to .10.

This is where I am at a loss. I don’t think that with good CTR and no competition I should pay more than .05 per click. Google is not making much money from this keyword so why not let me pay .05 so they can at least get something instead of nothing. I am not sure high my CTR has to be in order for minimum bid to be at .05 per click but when I am the only one that is displaying ads for a certain keyword, I think Google should give some leniency.

Am I wrong? If I am I would like to hear some feedback about this.

Best Buy Rips People Off

Paul Benetis — Fri, 25 May 2007 20:09:22 +0000

Not that this should come as a surprise to anyone that has shopped at Best Buy, but Connecticut’s attorney general accused Best Buy for overcharging its customers.Â Supposedly the salespeople would show the customers prices for certain products on the internal Best Buy website, making people believe that they are getting a deal they would if they shopped online.

If this accusation is true, I hope that Best Buy gets what they deserve.Â I have had some bad experiences with that store and cannot say that I am their fan.Â Some people are not “internet savy” or just don’t like to shop online.Â I don’t believe its fair that they have to pay a higher price because of it.Â Best Buy taking advantage of them is simply unacceptable.

Source:Â washingtonpost.com

Problem with NBA.com

Paul Benetis — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:46:17 +0000

I went to NBA.com just now to check the playoffs schedule and noticed something wrong with the site. When you hover over the main menu, the sub-menus show up too low. When you try to move your mouse over, you are forced to leave the main menu area which then turns off the sub-menu. Very annoying.

I decided to check the site with other browsers and here are the results:

Firefox (my default browser) – problem with the sub-menus showing up too far below the main menu, making the whole menu unusable.
Internet Explorer – everything seems to be working fine, go figure.
Opera – the menu is completely unusable, the submenus show up sporadicly, moving away from one menu option doesn’t turn off the previews options sub-menu. Just a mess.

Now, this would not annoy me us much if the site was some personal blog, but this is NBA. Comon, can you guys afford web designers that can design a site that works across all platforms?

I guess I’ll go and get the info at ESPN.com