joey_muller

It's not meant to replace AdWords but instead provide automated daily emails in an easy-to-digest format that gets the most important points across quickly.

I predict Google will come around and open up your adwords account again. Don't give up on it if, of course, you want their traffic. Were you running product listing ads (PLAs) as well?

Very helpful indeed. Thanks

Your app looks very cool. Best of luck to you.

Thank you, Mike, for continuing to push ahead with D3. It's nice to see so many folks are using -- and benefiting from -- it!

right on! nice to see folks lending real support at this time of year.

I'd rather be discussing Ron Conway's decision to put his muscle -- and money -- behind efforts to stop gun violence.

Agreed. Who cares if there is a tax break for this. I think this donation is well-timed and I would like to see more "rich" corporations follow suit. I was initially thinking he might do something for Sandy Hook. There is a community torn to shreds that will never be the same. Here is a list of ways we can all help now: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/12/14/connectic...

I got my evolver in 2005 and continue to love it's design and sound quality. His latest device, a joint effort with with Roger Linn called Tempest, is a refined drum machine with the signature fat sound and brilliant versatility of DSI.

Wow, Google's stock should rise on this news. Many folks may not know Kurzweil keyboards (for music), but they are excellent. I can't wait to see where he leads us next.

I find myself disagreeing with my cofounder on things like giving the user more and more control. It adds too much complexity. Providing the basic, minimum requirements will be sufficient for 99% of our customers. I'd rather focus on them than the small sliver of folks who'd want that extra control.

It looks like a Google creation. Nothing wrong with that. I would expect Google to know a thing or two about funnels.

Best of all is the big button -- I know what to do!

It's cool. You're still young. You'll look back at these years and realize how much you really learned with Jeff and the gang at Twilio. Keep writing and reaching out to people and above all have fun. Chicago is a pretty nice backup city. :)

I liked this post and the title. As a PPC manager, I see all kinds of business models and can attest to the 3 tier method working best. The most interesting thing is how you arrive at these through bracketing. Nice work.

Like you said, it shouldn't happen, but it's inevitable.

Yes. In fact we have an agency account which costs a bit more. We use it all the time for a roster of folks who don't want to pay the monthly fee but are interested in improving conversion rates.

Custom headline + no navigation menu + big call to action = big conversion rate!

Not only was the site down for me in San Francisco but the Likes count buttons on several blogs were not loading. Can't the like button at least be cached?

Haha. Exactly what I was thinking. I am sure there's a "Vaccinated by Larry Group on Google+" group coming soon.

D3 seems to be gaining strength here. Sure, it doesn't work perfectly in all browsers and requires a bit of customization effort to make the charts look really good. But for me, it is a joy to interact with a chart and show different views without fetching server data each time. Data lives in the DOM -- this is a powerful thing.

Startups also need to consider what traffic sources are arriving at their landing page. As a paid search guy, I'm sending traffic from Google PPC to landing pages, not home pages, and we're optimizing these pages all the time.

We leverage over a decade of experience and are happy to offer individual startups advice. (We also have a conversion optimization program available for a fee.) I'm also happy to summarize our best practices (for paid search anyway). We preach this stuff all day long.

- What is the search intent of the visitor for each keyword you're buying? Own this question by pulling search term reports as often as possible. - Be sure the ad copy matches search intent

- Be sure the landing page matches the ad, which matches search intent

- Have a very strong offer that stands out from the crowd. This one usually takes a team to develop. Test different offers.

- If the all of the above are in line, get the @#$% outta the way! Don't fill your landing page with all kinds of unnecessary links, videos, white papers, history, about the team, etc. Just provide a nice big button to push them along the funnel.

- Some folks benefit from placing a signup form directly on the landing page. Others actually want to qualify the visitor a bit more by forcing a click to the next page. It all depends on you.

- Are you equipped to handle phone calls? Then provide a big phone number! And use dashes like this: 415-123-4567, not periods 415.123.4567.

- Test, test, and test some more. We swear by Optimizely for LP testing.

Hope this helps.

Nice job of showing/hiding the source behind each chart. For me the real power of D3 is binding it to data using APIs. I wonder who is already doing this.

All I can say is, phew!

D3 really is a powerful way to visualize data on the web. Check out the gold standard of d3 charts, created by Mike Bostock: http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock.