I got out of this morning and started making some improvements to my site suggested by the Joel on Software crew (thanks guys!), especially fixing one critical display bug with Internet Explorer (that required me to remove a nice visual effect but the jarringness of it was worth taking the hit). I also tinkered a little bit with my AdWords campaign. Then my phone rang and a friend of mine invited me out to the mall. I haven’t seen the sun in seven days, so I figured, “Let the business run itself for six hours”. And while he came over, I wrote some Google ads. I was sort of proud of one of them — its almost guaranteed to hit either a reading teacher or a homeschool mother because nobody else knows one of the words in it. The text offers a freebie in the ad title, and the next two lines are “Tired of paying $10 each for vocab cards? Try out a better way for free.”
Six hours later, none of my other adds had been displayed yet. Not totally unexpected, since the US has only been awake for about 30 minutes. That ad had been a few times — not a statistically significant number or anything. And the click through rate? Holy mother of God. Now I just need to keep optimizing the web site to get my reading teachers to convert… and then start figuring out obscure words known only by elementary math teachers.
