All entries for November 2009

Google Geographic Targeting helps Fostering Agency

Writing about web page http://www.nexusfostering.co.uk/fostering.php?p=carers

Many of my client’s are now using geographic targeting for their Adwords. The TV digital aerial installer is clearly local, whereas the forklift truck hire and service company provide a two hour call out response promise so the distance of new clients from their base is critical. I have been tracking the gradual improvement in the still flawed geographic tracking within the UK’s ADSL network.

The best geographic targeted campaign that I have ever seen is for Nexus Fostering’s Foster Carers who used a 5 point polygon on Google’s map. They still had problems with out-of-area applications so I refined their polygon to have over 20 points and added a list of towns and cities outside the area as negative keywords. Here again the limitation is their support promise to all their foster carers and foster children. The recruitment of another social worker in the west country means that I have to unpick some of their excluded towns. I have also found that you can combine multiple polygons, towns and ‘within n miles’ circles successfully.

To learn more about the underlying limitations that BT’s wholesale ADSL imposes see this previous entry.

Robert McGonigle : 20 Nov 2009 13:27 |  Tags: Foster Carers Fostering Geographic Targeting Google Adwords |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BonusPrint throw away my Christmas Card Masters! How Not to get repeat business!

Writing about web page http://ppcpromotion.co.uk/blogs

Last year I created some Christmas Cards to send to clients and business contacts. I used BonusPrint who were competitive, had good tools and an album to save your work in progress.

Recently I went back to update and order a lot more. These cards were not featured in their promotions this time but it was not worth the effort to shop around; they would get the repeat business. So I tried to login and failed. Copied in the email address they send their constant stream of free this and free that offers to and they do not recognise this. I call to sort the problem to be told that all albums are deleted if not accessed after 3 months. To justify this their ‘customer services’ agent pointed out that they has lost most of their web-albums a couple of months ago!

How not to get repeat business! How do businesses win more repeat business? Surely by making it easier for their customers to buy? In this case, storing one file would have brought PPC Promotion back year after year!

Why have I put a link to the Blogs page on my site? This is a bit circular, surely?
Well, if you are interested in AdWords & Search entries then this page has featured entries from several blogs that are manually edited to be still relevant today.

Robert McGonigle : 19 Nov 2009 16:31 |  Tags: Bonusprint Poor Service Repeat Business |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem