Second Phone Call with Google AdWords

In effort to selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, I have been able to get free phone calls for the first 6 weeks free phone call with Google Ad Words.  Please see my other blog on my first and third phone call experience.  After a week from the first phone call with Google AdWords, as they suggested I have called them the second time. I think that the call was not as useful as the first one, but I did get some ideas out of it.  There was no wait time for the call other than the fact that I have to provide the ID in email before conversation. Like last time, two days later, she has sent me a summary of the call with suggested link which I think is great that they do that.

Here are some questions I asked, and the answer.

1. Does the capitalization matter when I enter the keywords? 

No. 

2. Does the spacing matter when I enter the keywords? 

Google usually take account when users make mistake on spelling such as forgetting to enter space.  It will not help significantly by adding misspelled words. 

3. I have pending approved ads, can you approve it? 

This is one thing that I think they helped this time and last time that they expedited the under reviewed ads. By reading what other people are saying, this under review could take weeks.  By mentioning on the phone call, they were able to approve it in a day.

4. I have Google Merchant setup, but it is still under review.  Can you do something about it? 

This did not help.  She mentioned that it is another department, and she will check.  In the follow-up email, she mentioned that it usually takes few weeks for this to be approved.  As of now (2 weeks), the Google Merchant is still under review for Product Search, although Product Ads are approved. 

5. How does Quality Score relates to the bidding price? 

Bidding price is lower if the Quality Score is higher.  So the suggestion was to make the ads and keywords as well as landing page content as close as possible to boost the Quality Score which drives the Bidding Price. She suggested this link to read/watch. 

6. Any other suggestions? 
As always, she suggested for raising the bid price.  Yes, I know….

In the first few days, I was getting impression of more than 1000 a day, but it is slowly reducing.  I see the reason is that CTR (Click Through Rate) is low. In other words, when the ad is shown, users are not clicking on them.  So I think I will play around more to focus on #4 especially now. 

Spreading the Words; 20th Century Way

Back in 1998 I had an opportunity to work for a company in Japan which was selling items online.  As an entry job for me back then, my job was to go through all the blogs that was kept in Excel sheet and post an ad on each one of them.  Along with the blog, there were list and list of search engine that was kept in the same Excel sheet. Every time the company created a new page, my job was to go to each one of the list and submitted the site to all the search engines.  There was no Google back then, and no Facebook or Twitter. Time has changed since then.

As you can see on my previous blog, I have been focusing on the 21st century way of getting the words around such as Google and various popular social media sites to promote selling Shiroi Koibito Japanese Chocolate, but it made me ponder: would the 20th century way still be beneficial?  People do still blog, and there are still many minor search engines out there aren’t there? If I can reach even one potential customer, it might be  a worth spending Saturday night posting some ads on those sites. 

So I looked around, and found some sites that we can post advertisement for free.  What I found quickly was that many of the sites do not allow commercial use.  As Google says, don’t do evil. I don’t want to violate rules and posting my link to those who don’t want me to.  I learned it kind of hard way; I signed up for Flicker account and posted some of the pictures of the products with linked to the site.  They sent me an email the next day basically asking to remove the link.  I removed the link right away, and sent an apology email.  After that, I am more careful. I don’t want to make anyone mad. 

So below are the Saturday night list of places that I posted my ads.

Social Bookmarking and classifieds:

• www.Delicious.com 
• www.diigo.com (I could join a group of interest and post a topic. It allows me to bookmark and share with public, but little hard to do. You have to drag their icon to tools and then go to the page to bookmark. Once you do it, it is easy, but it was hard for me to understand at the beginning)
• www.ClaigsList.com (You can only post one ad in one city.  There are some people saying that you can use different emails etc, but I just created one ad)
• www.manta.com (Business Listing)

There are a lot more list of social bookmarking sites here, but I burned out at this point.  I'll see if I am getting a lot of traffic from these pages, then I might continue down the list later. 

Search Engines:

At this point, I have already submitted my site to the obvious: Google and Bing.

This blog gave me an idea if it really is good to do this or not, and my ultimate decision was, why not?

There are many of the search engines that I used back in 1999 that are no longer doing business.  Many are simply using google or yahoo as their feeder and no longer have “submit URL” page.  Below are the list of search engines that allowed me to submit a site.  I suppose many of the ones below will quickly be obsolete in next few years, but this is THE list of the survivors as of January 2013.  All the list below are free submission sites.

• www.amfibi.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.anoox.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.activesearchresults.com  (If you click on confirmation email, they will list on higher position)
• www.boitho.com
• www.dmoz.org (According to this site feeds to Google, so it is probably a good idea to do this)
• www.exactseek.com (Require email confirmation)
• www.gigablast.com
• www.infotiger.com
• www.Jayde.com  (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.linkcentre.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.mixcat.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.onemilliondirectory.com
• www.scrubtheweb.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.secretsearchenginelabs.com
• www.somuch.com (Require email and email confirmation)
• www.where2go.com (Require registration with email confirmation)

  

In addition, I have listed my listing in below Japanese Classified sites for Japanese audience:

• www.mixb.com - (There have one site for each for NY, San Francisco and LA)
• www.soysource.net - (Seattle’s Classified)

Free Phone Call with Google AdWords Support

About a week after I setup an account with Google AdWords, Google have sent me an email saying that I can call their support to improve the AdWords campaign for free.  The support is provided for the first 6 weeks without any cost.  That's great. I called the support center the next day, and spent about 15 minutes with the support representative.  No wait time. I just needed to enter the account number which was on the email.  The support asked me what my product is, and after that they suggested three things.

1. Separate Campaign by Language
Since Shiroi Koibito chocolate cookie is Japanese, my page is set up so that I have a page for English and another page in Japanese.  I had two ads; one in English and one in Japanese all in one campaign.

2. Remove any one word key word
I had massively entered all the key words that I can think of, and using the keywords tool with $0.01 set for most of the key words.  I had "Chocolate" or "Cookie" which they suggested to remove since they will never come up on the top unless I pay a fortune for each of the click.

3. Increase the bet
Of cause.  I did increased the bet for some.

I am still not getting many clicks, but "impr." (which stands for "impression" which means that the ad was actually shown to the user) has increased from 189 to 2468 in two days. Not bad.

They asked me to take these action and see how it goes, and I am supposed to call back in 4-5 days for more improvement.  Nice.   They sent me a summary of the improvements with some links to video tutorials on youtube and sent it to me in email the next day. Nice 2!

Well, little by little I am starting to feel like I am getting exposure, and you know what?  We just had the second order of two boxes today. Yeah!

AdWords screen showing 2468 Impression

See my other blog for the second  phone call and third phone call.

Creating Social Network Icon on the Web

After reading this article, I realized that I am missing Linked-In Icon on my website. Why not? So I did.

Here are the link to creating button on each of the social networking site for your reference.  It is pretty straight forward if you know basic HTML.   You just need to preview them online which generates code to paste.  Be careful that Google + code generates code to put inside <HTML> tag which might be overlooked.

• Facebook
• Google +
• Twitter
• Linked In

Social Network icon on my site

Getting Started on Google AdWords

So I want to increase the traffic, and natural path for me is to pay Google.   So I did. I signed up for Google AdWords. Google AdWords is basically how Google makes money by placing our ads in the search results.

It costs $5.00 for the set up fee.  Fine, I can handle that.   Signing up is the easy part, but once the account is set up, it is far more complicated than what I thought.

First you have to setup what Google calls "Campaign", and the "Campaign" can have more than one ads. OK. Each "Campaign" then can have set of keywords trigger to show the ads.  Now this is where the hard trade-off comes in place. You can add as many keywords as possible, and Google even suggests some of the keywords for you.  Then you have to place a bet.  How much would you willing to pay when someone clicks for the searched key words. If the bet is too low, the ad won't show up.  If the keywords are popular (which you can view which ones are popular), then you have to bet higher for the ads to come up.

Now my suggestion to you (if you are setting this up for the first time like I did), is to add at least 2-3 ads.  Each ads are reviewed by Google, and some takes almost instantly and some takes days.  I learned this from hard way that I only added 1 ad and waited for 3 days; the ad was still under review.  If you add 2-3 (as google suggests) per "Campaign", then even one ad takes longer to be reviewed, others will be approved sooner so that at least some of your ads will start showing up soon.

I am still in learning stage, so I will be playing around with the AdWords for a while which I plan to post more on this blog later.

Message from Google AdWords after getting my first campaign up.

Adding Google Analytic to The Site

I have added Google Analytic to the site now so that I can track how many people are visiting my website.  Google has made it very easy to add code to the existing site.  It is Java Script which I just need to copy and paste and is free service.

The statistic that it shows is very extensive. I am able to see whole bunch of information including geographic, where the users came from, and if it is organic search result (meaning that someone searched for the term in search engine and clicked on the site). 

I am still not getting enough traffic to the site; I have been posting some information on some blogs but feels like I am now a spammer which doesn't make me feel good.  

Screenshot of Google Analytic

Our First Order of Shiroi Koibito!!!

So we did it. We have our first order.  The order came from California. Yeah!  I am excited.   There is a big difference between 0 and 1.  The journey has just started; it is encouraging to see that we got our first order in such short period of time.  

First Order was 12 count.

Creating Google + and Twitter Account

I've got to have Google + Account also if I am creating Facebook page, right?  So I created a Google + account similar to the Facebook one.  As I just created the page, it is sad looking with no one following it, but that's where it starts: 0. I also created a tweeter account. I never had a twitter account so this is my first attempt.  A bit confused about what is there, but I am learning it!

It took me a little bit, but now the website has those three famous icons: Facebook, Google + and Twitter.

Creating Facebook Page

It is today's trend that we need to have some social media exposure to get more visitors to the website. So I have created a facebook account separate from my own personal facebook  account. I did not want to mix up this little business with my personal connection at this point since I have a day job and did not want to broadcast to everyone that I am doing this.
So I did.  Facebook account is created, and I entered some information.  I realized that a facebook "person" is different than facebook "Page".   I created a FaceBook page using the facebok "person".

The good thing that happened here is that I contacted an administrator of a similar page where they are selling Shiroi Koibito in Singapore.  Her facebook page  comes up on first page on google when you type the product name.  She was very nice and linked her page to my page, and that helped some traffic coming from her contacts. Great. I still do not get that many hits on the facebook page because it is not exposed to many people.  Getting hits from Singapore does not help much; I need hits from USA.

The FaceBook Page created: http://www.facebook.com/Shiroi.Koibito.US
Please also see my other post about Creating Social Network Icon on the Web Site.

The Beginning

This is where it starts. I am from Japan, and I have been living in USA for last 18 years.  I currently live and work here in USA.  Every time I go back to Japan, I am just amazed with all the Japanese food that i eat there.  I usually gain little bit of weight every-time I visit, but that's OK.

I love Japanese chocolates. Last time I went back to Japan, I brought back Shiroi Koibito - The Hokkaido's famous white chocolate.  Everyone loved it.  If you tried it, you know it.

When I finished eating, I tried to look if I can buy these online in US, and realized that there are no shop selling this.  I thought maybe I can create a website to sell these here.  This blog is about my struggle and fun of  establishing a little business selling these chocolate in USA.

At this point, I have created a website (http://www.guidea.com/Shiroikoibito/), placed the products on ebay, created some social media exposure by creating page on facebook and Google Plus.  Let's see.