In an effort to boost sales at BeardHats.com I setup a PPC campaign with Facebook to gauge the quality of the leads versus say Google’s Adwords. Facebook’s tools for setting up the ad and the audience seemed comparable to Adwords with the exception of deeper targeting due to the amount of personal information Facebook has about their users. After running for about 3 days now the exposure and traffic seems comparable so far with no strong relation to any higher conversion. If I find any conclusive evidence over the next month I will report back.
February 21, 2011
February 13, 2011
Google Website Optimizer
As a student of Ramit Sethi (Earn1k, IWillTeachYourToBeRich.com) I am continually reminded to test, test, test, and then test some more to find the best value proposition for my target audience. So tonight in an effort to increase the amount of testing I am doing on the advertising of my products and services I setup Google’s Website Optimizer on BeardHats.com. I wanted to try a few different layouts for the page to see what effect it may have on conversion. Google’s Website Optimization tool makes it quite simple to setup and track A/B testing and even multi-variant tests. At this point I am testing different content layouts and even price points.
June 21, 2010
Google’s Command Line Tool
Now I do not want to set a precedent here that I only post when Google releases a new tool, but unfortunately this is the most exciting thing since the Google Font API. GoogleCL, Google’s new Command Line tool, comes with access to Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa, and Youtube. I dislike Google as much as the next guy, despite using Gmail, gDocs, gCalendar, and having and Android phone, but you have to admit this really covers the gamut of what we use the web for most. The only thing missing is some kind of Facebook and/or Twitter utility via Google.
Google Project Page: http://code.google.com/p/googlecl/
May 19, 2010
Google’s Font API Released Today
Today Google released their Font API giving the web a free choice for high quality open source web-safe fonts. Not only are these fonts easy to use, they are also supported across most browsers including Internet Explorer 6. How easy? You call the Google Font API through a single line of code, and then reference the font-family to your heart’s desire in the style sheet.
How to use Google’s Font API
1. Insert linke to Google’s Font API in the HTML:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans" >
2. Then just reference the font family as you normally would in the CSS:
elementName { font-family: 'Droid Sans', serif; }
3. That is it. You are done. I present to you Droid Sans:
Droid Sans in all of its glory
Further Documentation on Google’s Font API
Google’s Font API Directory: http://code.google.com/webfonts This is where you can preview all of the fonts available, a Font Book if you will, and read Google’s documentation regarding the api.
Google’s documentation on the browser specific behavior:
http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/docs/technical_considerations.html#Browser_Behavior
Video demo from Net Tuts