Another Christmas In the Bag

I survived another one. I should get a T shirt or something. The sudden silence is eerie.

I don’t know why Christmas was compressed into the traditional four weeks after Thanksgiving this year, rather than strung out from Halloween on as usual. But these intense few weeks set new records for the busiest non-December week ever; for the biggest week ever (beating a 2008 benchmark); and for the biggest paycheck ever (beating the 2010 record by nearly $500). Excel indicates that I’m only running $1,900 behind LY (Quickbooks says $2,700) with a week left to go. Although it’s still going to be my first year-over-year decline, it’s a whole lot better than I had expected even two weeks ago. 

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I wonder why amazon.com is referring traffic to me. One customer left a note complaining that he couldn’t pay me with his amazon gift card, and Google’s realtime analytics periodically shows Amazon as a referring website. I don’t shop Amazon often enough to know how their referrals work. While I’m obviously happy for the traffic, I’m less thrilled about people thinking that I’m affiliated with the evil empire.

Speaking of evil empires: Micosoft, you are this close to losing me entirely.  The past few times I’ve gone to your site to ratchet up my ad spend, I ended up cutting it instead. So I was especially exasperated when you sent me an email with the subject  “Your ads or keywords require changes.” "As part of the editorial review process, we were unable to approve one or more of the ads or keywords you submitted”, you said, which is weird because I don’t think I’ve added any keywords or written any ads in months. When I clicked your handy links for a summary of the “problems,” you showed nothing listed. You said that you had vetoed three keywords in my “apparel” campaign, so I opened every ad group in that campaign…and still couldn’t find anything amiss. While I was looking, though, I did find several more keywords with quality scores that you had inexplicably demoted to 1 or 2/10. So after wasting half an hour during the busiest week of the year looking for problems that apparently don’t exist, I ended up deleting yet another handful of keywords. 

Honestly, I want Bing to show my ads, but you are making it much more difficult and expensive than it’s worth. I’m probably going to abandon you entirely now that Christmas is over.