Dariusz on Software

Google AdWords is popular marketing tool that allows you to attract customer attention. You "pay per click" - that means if potential customer is directed to your page (or e-commerce site) then you will pay.

There are two main variations of this tool:

• matching advert is located based on keywords entered by user in Google search
• matching advert is located based on content of a partner page (AdSense partner)

It seems both methods (keyword and content-based) are equal efficient, but wait: there's a big difference. When user is searching for some keywords it's very likely he will be interested in your product/service. When user is coming from AdSense page he may be directed to this page for different reason.

I used both methods from some time and got the following results from Analytics (Analytics / Traffic Sources / AdWords / AdWords Campaigns / ... / (content targetting)):

As you can see most traffic comes from "content targetting" (partner sites). Best keyword gave 10 times less visitors. But: see "Bounce Rate" and "Avg. Time on Site" parameters. >80% of visitors exited immedietly from my site. Keyword-based targetting gave better results: lower bounce rate and longer time spent on site.

Let's see how the best "partner site" (AdWords / Networks / Managed placements - off show details / ) looks like:

It's a "trash site" - highly positioned site (often with "stolen" content) focused on AdSense monetization. That's why visitor quality from that kind of sites if very low (high bounce rate).

Are your visitors coming from a "trash site"?

Guess who is the competitor for the FogBugz bug tracker:

But if you click on AdWords box you can see the following image (no server available):

Note the weird address: https://www.www.atlassian.com/software/jira/... It's the cause for invalid target link.

Of course it's a bug in configuration done by someone from Atlassian, but let's stop laughing and check what might be the final resolution for such type of problems:

• Google / AdWords: couldn't they just check (HTTP 200) any target address passed by theirs customer? It's a very simple change in the service
• Atlassian: automatic HTTP log scan won't be possible as web server hasn't been reached (DNS resolution phase), but 100% bounce rate should raise a warning

Anyway, dealing with such errors in non-systematic way (fixing just this error) is dangerous as further instances are not blocked. It's better to have an automatic process that helps with such errors exposure in the future.

We, at Aplikacja.info believe that bugs should be eliminated systematically i.e. every missed one should have proper effect in process change. The more "sensitive" process (more bugs exposed by the process) the smaller amount of bugs are left in the end. For example coding in PHP with massive refactorings is a trouble-maker (as the language has no static checking included and requires high level of test coverage to uncover every error). Any piece of internal check (only method names + parameter numbers done by lint-like tools) will help a lot there.