BlogClump - Blogging About Associations From a Gen Xer

I had ads run Thursday and Friday. The final totals are this: 453,750 impressions 93 spots ran Avg. CPM $0.65 I only had 2 people go to the website directly, but I did have 2 search for my company name exactly on Google, which hasn't happened before. Plus, I had several type in the web address directly, but without the /TV. Interesting experiment. Hope it helped some folks.

Since I had a request for it, here is the ad I created. Realize that I did this with stock photos, screen grabs, the microphone on a webcam and cheap and free software.

So I logged in this morning to see if the ads had finally been approved, and it turns out I had ads run yesterday! Here is the screen shoot of what I had run yesterday. Looks like almost 310k impressions in 72 spots. My average CPM was $0.46, which is actually less than the minimum bid of $0.50. Here is the Google definition of an impression: Impressions within a Google TV Ads context are counted as the number of set top boxes tuned into a specific network when your ad is aired. The set top box must be engaged with your ad for at least five seconds to count as an impression. Your account is charged for live impressions and DVR (digital video recorder) +1 impressions. Final impression numbers -- the basis of billing -- are determined four days after your ad airs The one issue I have right now is, looks like 0 people came to my website as a result of the ad. Overall lessons learned: 1) Don't be too afraid to have a max bid on the top end of the estimates. You will most likely be...

I get up this morning and check my account. The ad has not been approved by all partners, which means no ads today. Google takes up to 24 hours. Then the partners get it, and who knows how long they take? I also notice that the next auction dates for many of my day parts are next week. So, I am wondering if that means I am not going to get those displayed tomorrow. I wanted to show a few screenshots for people, so you could get an idea of what shows up along the way. This main campaign screen tells me my estimates on the right. It also shows me the day parts I bid on and what it looks like I will get with each one. You see my "Ad Approval Status" on the left. The two shots below are what you get when you click there.

Things are looking up. I have passed the first set of approvals!!! Now I am seeing the following: This ad has been processed by our television partners. It is still being processed by 5 of our partners. It is approved and ready to be shown by 1 of our partners. I also went through and added a bunch of extra target channels and day parts that were the cheapest out there, just so I can try to maximize what I get. My new estimates are 372k unique impressions, 723k total impressions, 76 spots for a total of $300. So, barring any disasters, I will have TV ads running in the morning! Lessons learned: 1. Have lots of time available to get this up and running. 2. Make sure everything in your final video is in that action safe area. 3. You can use free video editing software to get the final, TV ready video. I will have a follow up after Friday, once everything has run its course.

A lot of you may already know this tip, but someone shared it with me and I figured I would pass it along. If you are looking to pull in specific stories/posts/articles from other sources into your news section on your website, here is a handy way to do it. Setup a Google Reader account with all the RSS feeds you might pull stories from. Then use the "Share" feature to select the stories you want to post. Then you can get an RSS feed of your shared stories and display that. You have now sorted through all kinds of noise for folks and given them the goods!

I think I have seen this page more than anything else while working in adwords. (I zoomed in so you could read the screen shot)

On Friday, I wrote into Google again about the issue of the broken links and the fact that I still didn't know why the ad was rejected. I did get a call from a live human (different from the first guy) wondering how he could help. However, turns out that the TV ads is a totally different department than regular adwords, even though they both live under the adwords moniker. He tried to be helpful nonetheless and is supposed to call me this week with more info. In the meantime, I did get a notice this morning from another person that the video failed because not everything was in the Action Safe Zone again. One setting in Visual Communicator is to playback in action safe mode. However, I guess it doesn't save that way. I do have photos in the video that need to be cropped down to be "action safe." I am going to do that this morning, and repost. We shall see. This just in - the links to VideoPad and Movie Maker are now fixed!!! No one told me they were fixed, bu...