Facts, Fiction and views by valuepitchers

Today I saw a strange issue with one of the accounts conversion rate dropped by half which seemed to increase my cost per acquisition. I knew there was some problem somewhere and started on the task to detect where the problem is.

In no time I found that urchin.js seems to screw up my conversion tracking code hence throwing a error on the browser wit no script below it which got executed.

Come on Google you have to be very careful doing these changes as it can give a heart attack to people who depend on adwords console to see cost of conversion.

Seems Google is working on to enhance search experience by combining the data of organic search result along with the Google Map directions. These facility allows you to locate or get physical address of the URL listed in SERPS. It's good to submit the business name and location under Google Map to show the direction map and address along with organic search listing. It looks like a simple combination of Google Map listing associated with particular URL appearing in search results. If your business information is correctly submitted to Google Map it will be quite easy to get such result under organic search. But I get such results when I try various combinations using words like store and shop.. Seems Google is working to provide accurate directions using Google map when the nature of query is service specific and might require physical visit before making any purchase.

I tried following combination and got such results with Google Map enhancement.

online furniture store

online furniture shop

grocery store la quinta

grocery shop la quinta

The big guys made some huge error on Wednesday night. There seemed to be some sort of technical snag at their back-end which turned out to be quite disastrous for many advertisers.

On Thursday morning, we logged in to our Adwords accounts and noticed that our ad impressions has dropped tremendously to about 0.5% of their usual daily accrued impressions. We thought there must be some huge mistake on our part which went noticed, hence the sudden drop, but we hadn't even touched the account.

On further investigation, we found out that several advertisers all over the world faced similar problems. Seems the great Google can err once in a while too. For some reason, our ads were not being shown on all content sites. I wrote to Google twice regarding this snag, but I guess they are busy sorting it out, since I've still not received a response.

Such errors can be quite loss-making for several advertisers. I read of several individuals who missed out on several hundreds of dollars worth of business because of this single day of downtime.

Google makes Billions out of adwords every year. They should be more careful so we don't miss out on our own profits.