What's It Worth to You?

Just for the history books...last month finished as the second-best July ever and missed the #1 slot by just $43. That was good enough to cut the month's loss to just $49. I attribute that to forgoing vacation this year. I'm not going to shut down during this month's five-day mini-vacation weekend so I shouldn't lose any business to it. However, last August brought one bulk sale every week (three for kites, one for golf balls) so I'm already running behind.

Thanks, Google! 

Your AdWords account contains enhanced CPC (cost-per-click) campaigns and your account-level conversion bid metric is set to "Converted clicks," an outdated AdWords conversion metric. Starting September 21, 2016, it will no longer be possible to bid on "Converted clicks." Instead, all Target CPA or Enhanced CPC bidding strategies will be automatically updated to use "Conversions," a newer metric that will include Cross-Device Conversions and offers more flexibility and options to help you meet your business goals.

My what now? Several more paragraphs explained why "converted clicks" are becoming "conversions." Some flailing around turned up a one-click button to automatically implement this radical change. For some computery reason, each converted click counted as 1.14 conversions; now it will supposedly become 1:1.

While I was bulldogging through this I found a code snippet that tracks the actual dollar value of conversions. Previously, I had arbitrarily valued each conversion at $20 and hid that useless column. Knowing how much a conversion is really worth will help me spend more intelligently -- for example, a keyword that costs me $15 per conversion is no good if those conversions are only worth $20, but it's great if its sales average $100 or more. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that I broke conversion tracking entirely when I did the surgery. I need more data to be sure, and I'll probably need help from Google if I'm to avoid simply reverting to my original files. 

Contacting a megaconglomerate is as difficult as you would imagine; after 48 hours I'm still waiting for the reply that they promised within 24. If it is true to form, the reply that eventually arrives will be some boilerplate with links to Help pages that I've already read.  And when I finally reach a live person, s/he will speak only rudimentary English.

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O joyous day: the American Bald Eagle kite is back in production! I figure I lost about $1,000 in sales while it was out of stock. That's a good chunk of this year's $1,400 deficit relative to LY. August could be okay if there's enough summer left for pent-up demand to recoup some of that money.