Adwords Aggravation

My experience with Adwords continues to prove frustrating. My gambit of advertising the solver instead of the puzzles appears to be working, at least insofar as the solver is assigned a merely dismal Quality Score of 4 (for the “KenKen” keyword), while the puzzles are assigned a near-rock-bottom score of 2 for the same term.

My plans to address my low Adwords Quality Scores are twofold: First, do some research into what I might be doing wrong. Second, since the shift to advertising the solver proved fruitful, investigate whether other such ancillary pages might look better to Google. Both efforts, as discussed below, will take second place to a small development project. In the short term, in order to get some benefit from my Adwords campaign, I have simply raised my CPC bid.

Future Work

I’ve decided on the next pieces of work to be undertaken:

• First: more puzzles (I’ve already refined the puzzle generator, and posted ~200 new 9×9 puzzles this evening; give ’em a try)
• Next: better UI (Under the theory that it’s better to have a few delighted users than a lot of ambivalent ones, I’m going to try to make my puzzles more user-friendly, by adding, e.g., arrow-key navigation)
• Then: a different approach to AdWords, which I hope to be able to talk about tomorrow

Weekend Stats

Note that going forward, stats will be reported on a one-day-delayed basis; obviously, no post can contain complete statistics for the day of its publication.

Follow Along

You can subscribe to my RSS feed, if you’d like to follow along with this month’s project, in which I attempt to create and popularize a puzzle site.