Patrick Hundt .com

Spreadshirt relaunched

Patrick Hundt — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 12:58:21 +0000

It’s done eventually. After many months of hard work - especially from the project team - we were able to relaunch our website yesterday morning. It’s totally new, different and - of course - very cool.
There are still a few bugs that need to be fixed within the next coupld of days but it general it’s good for shopping already. Feel free to let us know what you think about it and where we could do (even) better.

Something’s going @ Spreadshirt

Patrick Hundt — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 07:54:17 +0000

it’s quite calm in the HQ right now. there might be a new website coming or something..

Some offtopic thoughts on a Wednesday’s night

Patrick Hundt — Wed, 16 May 2007 23:02:03 +0000

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.
To say the things he truly feels;
And not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows -
And did it my way!

What I’m listening to: not hard to guess

Preferred Cost Bidding

Patrick Hundt — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 10:32:23 +0000

Something new from Google AdWords.
It’s now possible not only to set your maxium bid for each keyword but your preferred average cost per click. Through some kind of bid management Google places your ad in a range of positions according to your preffered average click price.

Preferred cost bidding is an advanced bidding option available for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns. If you identify with the following goals, preferred cost bidding may be the right bidding strategy for you.

* I know how much each click or impression on my ad is worth to my business. (Learn more about determining the worth of clicks or impressions.)
* I would rather target an average cost per click or thousand impressions, rather than specifying the most that I am willing to pay.
* I want my AdWords advertising costs to be more consistent, rather than changing from day to day.
* I do not want to constantly monitor and adjust my bid settings. Within the budget that I set, I want Google to take care of my individual keyword or site bids.

Unique description meta tags - Wordpress plugin

Patrick Hundt — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 22:18:11 +0000

Recently I’ve found this old but pretty cool Wordpress plugin. It creates an individual meta description tag for each post and page. In order to avoid supplemental hell it’s important to assign unique description tags to every page on your website.
It’s also really simple to install: upload the .php file to your plugin folder, activate the plugin and delete the previously used meta tag from your header.php. Done.

Newcastle Affiliate Event

Patrick Hundt — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:31:43 +0000

There had been some workshops and guest speakers at last weeks UK affiliate event in Newcastle.
SEO expert Martin Murray spoke for about an hour. To me it was all too basic information but still not boring as he appeared to be a good speaker.
Neil Halpin from Yahoo contributed the most interesting but yet most controversial information on that afternoon. He introduced ‘Search Submit Pro’, a way of influencing your organic rankings - with money involved. Quite a sensitive subject which resulted in many questions of the audience.
Anyway, in case you’re interested in any of these presentations you can download them from a4uevents.com now.

This time I can’t provide any pictures from the event. During my one week trip I took the camera out only once. For this lovely English breakfast (the days after I ordered ‘Continental breakfast’):

Series of Quality Score Posts

Patrick Hundt — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 22:22:11 +0000

Fyi: Brad Geddes from ewhisper.net is devoting a whole week of blog posts to the biggest AdWords mystery: Quality Score in all its aspects. Quite interesting.

Unsteady March

Patrick Hundt — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 22:15:51 +0000

I’m still having issues with my websites’ search engine results. Back in January it seemed like I got penalised for something (whatever that may be). In February however I received a quite good amount of traffic from Google.
Now let’s take a look at the following stats from the beginning of March until now:

This is the fourth crash within about three weeks now. Then also my confidence in the whole site is up one minute, down the next. Now I’m waiting for getting back on track. Looking at the stats history it tells me everything should be fine by tomorrow.
Well, despite everything it motivates me to work harder on the backlink subject in hope for a more steady behaviour in the Google SERPs.

Visiting Newcastle

Patrick Hundt — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 00:00:54 +0000

I just signed up for the upcoming a4u event in Newcastle. I’m really excited about it as this is probably biggest event of this kind. This time it’s taking place on board the DFDS Seaways m.s Queen Of Scandinavia. There will be workshops, free entertainment and - of course - networking. In the evening the ferry is going to leave Newcastle for Amsterdam. I’m planning on going to the UK a few days before the event and stay another few days in Amsterdam afterwards.
The only thing that troubles me a bit is the quite small number of delegates (72 so far). Of course the whole event will be cancelled if there are not enough attendees. I hope for the best and look forward to it.

Google AdWords Updates

Patrick Hundt — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 14:02:23 +0000

Several updates have been made within the past few days.

Adjustments to the quality score algorithm:

Transparency: advertisers are now able to see their keywords minimum bids as well as a rough evaluation of the quality score (such as high, low and mediocre) in a separate column. You can select this column by clicking ‘Customize Columns’ in one of your ad groups.

Quality: As long as Google wasn’t able to collect data on the quality of a landing page the advertiser is benefited with a lower minimum bid. Also the algorithm in general has been improved.

I’m not too happy about the quality part as - again - my websites seem to be suffering from a low quality score for a lot of the keywords. So far all the quality score updates had only affected me temporarily. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Pause Keywords and ad creatives

As of yesterday advertisers can pause keywords and ad creatives. Before you could only delete them which used to be a bit annoying.