Professional Search Engine Optimization

Is Facebook Advertising Worth It?

Is Facebook advertising worth it in 2018?

While Facebook ads may work for some small businesses and enterprises, I’m not sure that Facebook is the right platform for business that want to scale and potentially run hundreds of campaigns.

I’m currently working with a company that spent over $1 million dollars in 2017 on Facebooks ads and we cannot get a live person on the phone.

With Facebook recently dropping some of their third party demographics data they paused hundreds of campaigns on my client’s account with no explanation on which specific parts of an ad were affected. We had to manually go through all of the ads that were paused to figure out what needed to be fixed or corrected.

As I worked with my VA to fix ads and get them turned back on we noticed that some of the ads were turning off / pausing again. After some investigation and visiting Facebook’s advertiser forum this seems to be an ongoing issue that has not been adequately addressed. While there are many posts with users sharing the same issue, Facebook’s primary response is that there must be other users that have access to your account pausing ads.

You would think that any company that has spent a million dollars on ads would be able to get someone on the phone to help you spend another two million dollars, that’s not the case. Apparently, Facebook is making so much money on ad revenue that unless you are spending well north of a million bucks you are left to figure out major issues by surfing the forums.

Google had this same approach back in the day, but at least Google can provide a tiered service; The more money you spend with them, the more help you can get to grow your advertising.

What’s an advertiser to do?

As of a couple of days ago I turned off all Facebook ads and will continue to migrate ad budgets over to Google Adwords. Once we can get issues resolved even if it’s via chat with an agent, we’ll consider ramping up Facebook ads.

What are your thoughts? How have recent updates / changes to Facebook’s advertiser platform affected your ads?

FREE Online XML To CSV Converter

Had to share this free online XML to CSV converter because it worked slick on to files for me. One file was 6MB and the other 11.5MB. I had some WordPress XLM that I needed to extract email addresses from. The site below did it flawlessly after putting email addresses into a column for me I was then able to import into MailChimp.

FREE ONLINE XML TO CSV CONVERTER

Google Adwords Search Network Only Issues

I managed Google Adwords at a very high level for nearly 9 years managing a monthly ad spend of $200k+ per month. Think of the ramifications if you didn’t recoup your ad budget with that type of burn.

Today, I’m looking at live website traffic via Wordfence and astounded to see how much Google Adwords traffic is coming from doubleclick and parked domains.

Under my campaign settings, I’m set for Google search and search partners. One would assume that this would be premium traffic from legitimate mobile or desktop searchers landing on Google.com or a partner website. (whatever that really means)

In my opinion, parked domain traffic is some of the worst potential traffic and Adwords customers should not be paying a premium for clicks coming from parked domains. I put these types of domains up there with the “Display Network” traffic. While some publishers try to make money by running Adsense or DoubleClick and creating great content to draw a real audience, others have mastered the art of “click fraud” on parked domains and similar Adsense sites.

With the Display Network, you can monitor conversions and even block domains that don’t generate conversions at your targeted numbers or CPA. With parked domains running under Google’s “Search only and search partners” you have no way of managing these sites…and I think Google is keenly aware of this. I’m hoping at some point Google will create a distinction between “Search only” and “Search Partners” so you can turn off “search partners” if you choose or manage the conversions that come from search partners.

The only way you can catch this activity is by monitoring live traffic coming to your site or a third party analytics tool…not “Google Analytics”.

So Google…if you by chance happen to catch this short write-up, I hope you’ll consider giving Adwords advertisers more control over what types of traffic we get via Google search only / partners and the ability to block or turn specific types of traffic off.

Here’s my final thought. I think Google knows very well that by keeping the curtains closed on search only partner traffic they have a better ability to dial or tweak the type of traffic a specific advertiser receives. This allows them to send more direct search traffic from Google search while less important advertisers get a blend of search only and partner traffic.

What are your thoughts on the quality of traffic coming from Google search only partners?

PS – When talking to Google Adwords rep, I asked him the difference between Adsense traffic (Display Network) and DoubleClick traffic (Search Only / Partners) traffic. Supposedly, DoubleClick is for high-end advertisers / clients with big budgets. So if that’s the case, why would DoubleClick be involved with parked domain traffic?

AMP Pages Search Engine Pro Test

I’ve successfully implemented AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) on SearchEnginePro.net you can check it out here: http://searchenginepro.net/sitemap/amp/ via AMP Supremacy for WordPress. One of the elements Google Webmaster tools test for with AMP pages is whether or not links are too close so I’ll post the URL here: “ampsupremacy.com” – There are many other tools for developing AMP pages in WordPress so I’ll continue to post / update as I test them.

Here are some of my next test objectives with AMP:

Test pages and work through some of the error messages such as links being too close or a page title / URL being too long
Develop and test forms embedded in an AMP page
Test product inventory via AMP

Resources:

AMP Forms: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-form
AMP WYSIWYG – https://community.alfresco.com/docs/DOC-5319-amp-for-web-client-wysiwyg-textareas

See AMP version of this page: http://searchenginepro.net/amp-pages-search-engine-pro-test/amp/

Why The iPhone 7 Sucks For Making Movies & Live Streaming

No Audio Input & Charging For iPhone 7

Something no one is talking about and I hoped I would find somewhere on the interwebs is the fact that the new dongles coming out for the iPhone 7 only support audio out. I purchased two which arrived today…tried to make several phone calls in which I could not here the caller, they could not hear me, but I can listen to audio played from my iPhone 7.

Note: When I looked closely at the sellers description on eBay they do state “listen to audio”, but in reality that’s not the only reason iPhone 7 users want a 3.5mm jack support.

I typically use my iPhone’s GPS and plug my phone into the charger and then would wear my head phones to listen to directions or take / make phone calls. This now appears to be impossible with the iPhone 7

This is a huge negative in my opinion for anyone wanting to live-stream or do any serious movies with iPhone 7 as there is no way to plug a power-pack into the phone while having the ability to record audio at the same time.

With my old iPhone 6 I’ve live-streamed events while keeping my phone powered up with an external battery pack…I’ve yet to find a solution for the iPhone 7.

Shooting video at any length with the iPhone 7 without external power will be impossible. If Apple does not address or fix this the iPhone 7 is a useless device for movie makers.

Sure the TRRS adapter will allow you to connect any of your Rode / Lavalier mics, but you’ll be lucky to shoot video for more than 60 minutes without needing to stop and put your iPhone on a charger before you can continue.

So here’s my challenge to anyone reading this article… Are you aware of any current or future solutions that will allow for audio input and simultaneous charging on the iPhone 7? If so, feel free to correct me and share here.

iPhone 7 Sucks For Making Movies
iPhone 7 Sucks For Livestreaming
No Audio Input & Charging For iPhone 7
Charging iPhone 7 With Audio Input
No Lightning Audio Input iPhone 7

Apple why did you do this? Steve Jobs would not approve of this dongle of a phone

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What You Need To Know Before Registering A Domain Name

I’ve been helping a friend gain control of a domain name he acquired when he purchased a T-shirt brand earlier this year. We’ve been trying to get it transferred into his possession or control for nearly three weeks now. Interestingly many people don’t grasp the importance of maintaining or keeping control of their domain.

Trying to transfer a domain name away from a reseller account can take up to 7 days on each attempt and domain name transfers fail often oddly.

Here are some tips if you are considering the purchase of your first domain name or acquiring a website:

If you are purchasing your first domain name, never have a friend or family member do it
Make sure the domain is registered in your name and using an email address that is under your control
Always safeguard your logins as if they were gold. Keep them safe, backed somewhere…not just saved in your email somewhere
Always try to purchase your domain name through a major registrar such as GoDaddy, Namebargain, etc. There are a few exceptions where I recommend Network Solutions as they are over-priced at the moment.
If you purchase your domain name through a reseller, make sure you are not limited in your ability to manage the domain name or move it. In the example above with my friend; His domain was registered through WIX a Network Solutions reseller, but they prevent him from fully managing his domain or editing DNS / Name Server entries.

If you buy a website and you don’t have full control of the registering email address, you don’t really have full ownership of your domain name.

eComily Honest Review – eComily Real Review

Unbiased and Honest Review of eComily

eComily is an Instagram curation tool that curates data from a single Instagram account to your ecomilyapp.com store. Here’s a sample mine:

Instagram Marketer – eComily Store

Most marketers pitching eComily App don’t have an active store or actually using it…I know, I hit up multiple offers I found on Facebook and asked numerous IM’ers that were pitching the product developed by Precious Ngwu and developer of WP plugins, and a variety of other Internet marketing related tools. Needless to say, none of the IM’ers on FB responded back to me with a link to their working store…they could only send me to their product pitch page.

The eComily App does come with a 30 day money back guarantee so that’s a good thing.

I purchased the pro upgrade which was very confusing. There was absolutely no documentation or videos on software requirements..I never knew it was a WordPress plugin until I installed it on a WP site and then discovered that it also requires WooCommerce to function. This little bit of information is not shared anywhere.

I think that eComily was released too soon. Better documentation should have been developed along with some more detailed videos on setup and use. For someone to drop $67 on a product that has no documentation and then to admit in video sales letters that the ecomily store is pretty much a joke is very misleading on the part of Precious Ngwu.

For $29 you can get a single site license for a Woocommerc / WordPress plugin that does nearly the same thing.

WooCommerce Instagram

I’m still undecided as to whether or not I will ask for a refund. It primarily depends on the response I get back from support.

Let me know if you have any questions regarding eComily and I’ll do my best get you an answer.

#honestecomilyreview #ecomilyreviews

Honest eComily Review