I haven't seen a product move so quickly into the Top Ten as our Halloween Cookies did this year. They're the big hit this season, and the good news is that they'll be available for your treating needs until Friday.
If you're looking to order any of our other Halloween items, act fast. Orders will close for our Halloween Gift Baskets on Wednesday at 2PM. Halloween Petits Fours will be available only until noon on Wednesday for second-day air delivery, and noon on Thursday for Overnight delivery. Two-for-one shipping will be available on the petits fours as long as they're in stock.
Next year, Halloween is on a Wednesday, and all of this is much easier. In the meantime, here's our Top 10 Products:
1. Chocolate Birthday Cake (complete party kit) -- still the reigning champion of baked goods. Coming soon to a college campus near you--and if you need to send one to a school, take a look at our Ten Easy Steps to Successful School Shipping, which will make your life easier whenever you order something online.
2. Vanilla Birthday Cake (complete party kit) -- gaining in popularity, we now sell three of these four every four Chocolate Birthday cakes. Did you know that you don't have to get the Party Kit? If you know the recipient has plenty of plates and serving stuff, use the Coupon Code NOPARTY at checkout. We'll leave out the party kit, and you'll save $5.
3. Stollen -- it's not quite Stollen season yet, but we're baking fresh batches, and they're every bit as good as they were last year. Why not get an early start on enjoying this year-end favorite? Strong birthday cake sales mean that our Stollen has a long way to go to reclaim the top-selling spot this Christmas, and I'm counting on you to help it get there.
4. Croissants -- a perennial favorite--did you know that you can order custom assortments? Want all plain? No problem. Don't like the Raspberry ones? No problem. How about a dozen with six plain and six chocolate? We've done all of that. Just tell us what you'd like in the Comments section when you place your order. It takes us an extra day or two to put together custom assortments, depending on the breakdown, but we're happy to make them.
5. Demitasse Party Petits Fours -- still riding high from their appearance in Shop Etc. and InStyle, and you can send up to three boxes and pay shipping for one. Look for the Christmas version of these in late November.
6. Halloween Cookies -- at every holiday, something breaks out and becomes the must-have item for our customers. Last year it was our Jack-O-Lantern Cookie, which sold out almost as soon as it appeared on the site. This year, it's our Halloween Minis. Maybe it's the buy up to three tubs and pay shipping for one option, or maybe it's just the Ozzy Osbournesque thrill of biting the head off a bat without the unpleasant rabies shots afterward.
7. Baby Boston Coffee Cakes -- Do you need a corporate gift for a small office? Maybe something for someone who really loves coffee cake? These are the perfect choice, which is why they're always in the Top 10.
8. Sugar-Free Low-Carb Flourless Chocolate Cake -- who says you can't have cake? Lots of folks have had this cake, and they love it. Chocolate emerges victorious against all other varieties once again.
9. Gourmet Cookies Gift Assortment -- we actually sold out of these for more than a week when we got hit with a lot--and I mean a lot--of orders. We wound up using every bit of cookie dough we had in the bakery and had to order the ingredients to make more. They're back now, and while we'd love to run out again, we'll do our best to avoid that.
10. Lemon Lulu Cake -- just because summer is over, that doesn't mean you lemon lovers out there need to surrender your desire for this cake. They're made fresh straight through the winter months, and they make a very tasty Thanksgiving dessert for those who avoid pie.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Shopping.com: A bunch of liars
Deceptive advertising really ticks me off. You've got enough misinformation to sort through without some "marketing genius" trying to mislead you when you want to buy something.
Boohoo Search Marketing apparently does a much poorer job than Google of protecting it's advertisers' interests. Case in point: This new ad from the liars at shopping.com:
1 800 Bakery at Shopping.com
Find, Compare and Buy 1 800 Bakery. Choose from Thousands of stores.
www.shopping.com
I won't dignify the rats at lying.com with a link. You shouldn't dignify them with your business, because, as I've said many times, if someone's going to lie to you, how can you trust anything they say?
Here's an honest statement:
We are not affiliated in any way, shape, or form, with the liars who run shopping.com. You will not find our products there, only lies.
That should get the point across. The filthy lying liars at lying.com need to stop buying ads on our company name and misleading our customers. Boohoo Search Marketing ought to do a better job of preventing this. I've rewritten our ad in Boohoo, and I'm fully expecting a rejection for "trademark violation," at which point a lovely conversation will begin with them about why one company is allowed to break the rules and another isn't.
You can rest assured that I'll post every word.
Boohoo Search Marketing apparently does a much poorer job than Google of protecting it's advertisers' interests. Case in point: This new ad from the liars at shopping.com:
1 800 Bakery at Shopping.com
Find, Compare and Buy 1 800 Bakery. Choose from Thousands of stores.
www.shopping.com
I won't dignify the rats at lying.com with a link. You shouldn't dignify them with your business, because, as I've said many times, if someone's going to lie to you, how can you trust anything they say?
Here's an honest statement:
We are not affiliated in any way, shape, or form, with the liars who run shopping.com. You will not find our products there, only lies.
That should get the point across. The filthy lying liars at lying.com need to stop buying ads on our company name and misleading our customers. Boohoo Search Marketing ought to do a better job of preventing this. I've rewritten our ad in Boohoo, and I'm fully expecting a rejection for "trademark violation," at which point a lovely conversation will begin with them about why one company is allowed to break the rules and another isn't.
You can rest assured that I'll post every word.
Thursday, October 05, 2006
All Comedy Is Local
I'm normally above using this blog for shameless self-promotion, but since I know there's a few of you out there who enjoy my humorous take on things, I'd like to let you know that you can get a quick fix at votegerry.cf.huffingtonpost.com, where I've posted an excerpt from my Campaign for Governor speech.
It's work-safe and contains a few good laughs, so I've been told.
Meanwhile, to justify this waste of corporate time, I should remind you that we've got all kinds of Halloween Treats available for your gift-giving and seasonal snacking needs. In my oh-so-unbiased opinion, the Jack-O-Lantern Cookie and Halloween Candy Cake are two of the coolest things you'll find anywhere online this season.
It's work-safe and contains a few good laughs, so I've been told.
Meanwhile, to justify this waste of corporate time, I should remind you that we've got all kinds of Halloween Treats available for your gift-giving and seasonal snacking needs. In my oh-so-unbiased opinion, the Jack-O-Lantern Cookie and Halloween Candy Cake are two of the coolest things you'll find anywhere online this season.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
Combating Chinese Click Fraud
If you're following the latest news, there's a good chance that you came across the BusinessWeek story on click fraud in the current issue. I've been involved in a battle of my own on this issue that runs beyond the scope of their article, so I thought I'd share the story.
We started looking at our server logs after a quarterly report showed around 12% of our traffic was coming from China. We don't sell our products in China, and we've only had a couple of orders sourced from that part of the world. I knew it was fraud as soon as I saw the numbers.
The traffic was coming from a handful of sites, listed here so that you can see if they're showing up on your own servers:
http://aries-search.com/index.php
http://buddah-search.com/index.php
http://800-search.com/index.php
http://www.hit2seek.com/
http://www.agafra.com/
If you look at these sites, on most of them you'll see the same text: "80% bid, $5 payout," which should be your cue that you're dealing with fraud. Here's how they work: These "search engines" are actually scraping content from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. They sign people up to sit and click links all day, then give the clickers a portion of the revenue generated from the clickthroughs--in the case above, 80% of the payout on the clickthrough (if you're unfortunate enough to wind up on these sites, you'll see the value of the click to the clicker) up to $5.
Imagine an Internet cafe filled with people clicking away on your ads to make a few pennies. That's what you're up against.
Since I was batting a thousand on instinct, I decided to blame Google AdWords. They've had problems in the past, the search terms that were coming up had been pulled from Boohoo Search Marketing, and the traffic was out of line with our daily bill from MSN.
That decision lowered my instinct average to .500. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that Google could not be the culprit. We've taken steps to prevent this from happening, including limiting our ads to the United States and opting out of the Content Network. I sent Google an apology after I heard back from them, one that I'll reiterate here. It wasn't Google--they've done right by us so far.
I did a little research based on the landing pages the fraudsters were seeing. As it turned out, all of the fraudulent clicks were coming from two second-tier advertising networks that I'd forgotten about--ePilot and Miva. I suspended our accounts with both providers, and sent an e-mail explaining the situation to ePilot, but I haven't heard anything back from them. I'll assume that's because they're busy finding ways to stop these fraudulent clicks.
What tipped me off was the ads that were appearing on these click fraud engines. I always vary the copy from ad to ad, partly to A/B test, and partly so I know where the traffic is coming from.
With the accounts disabled, the fraudulent Chinese traffic disappeared. I'm still keeping an eye out for it, but so far we're clear. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but anyone in small business knows that a penny lost to fraud is a penny better spent on promotion.
With that in mind, I'd like to offer the following Five Tips for Combating Click Fraud:
We started looking at our server logs after a quarterly report showed around 12% of our traffic was coming from China. We don't sell our products in China, and we've only had a couple of orders sourced from that part of the world. I knew it was fraud as soon as I saw the numbers.
The traffic was coming from a handful of sites, listed here so that you can see if they're showing up on your own servers:
http://aries-search.com/index.php
http://buddah-search.com/index.php
http://800-search.com/index.php
http://www.hit2seek.com/
http://www.agafra.com/
If you look at these sites, on most of them you'll see the same text: "80% bid, $5 payout," which should be your cue that you're dealing with fraud. Here's how they work: These "search engines" are actually scraping content from pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. They sign people up to sit and click links all day, then give the clickers a portion of the revenue generated from the clickthroughs--in the case above, 80% of the payout on the clickthrough (if you're unfortunate enough to wind up on these sites, you'll see the value of the click to the clicker) up to $5.
Imagine an Internet cafe filled with people clicking away on your ads to make a few pennies. That's what you're up against.
Since I was batting a thousand on instinct, I decided to blame Google AdWords. They've had problems in the past, the search terms that were coming up had been pulled from Boohoo Search Marketing, and the traffic was out of line with our daily bill from MSN.
That decision lowered my instinct average to .500. If I'd thought about it, I would have realized that Google could not be the culprit. We've taken steps to prevent this from happening, including limiting our ads to the United States and opting out of the Content Network. I sent Google an apology after I heard back from them, one that I'll reiterate here. It wasn't Google--they've done right by us so far.
I did a little research based on the landing pages the fraudsters were seeing. As it turned out, all of the fraudulent clicks were coming from two second-tier advertising networks that I'd forgotten about--ePilot and Miva. I suspended our accounts with both providers, and sent an e-mail explaining the situation to ePilot, but I haven't heard anything back from them. I'll assume that's because they're busy finding ways to stop these fraudulent clicks.
What tipped me off was the ads that were appearing on these click fraud engines. I always vary the copy from ad to ad, partly to A/B test, and partly so I know where the traffic is coming from.
With the accounts disabled, the fraudulent Chinese traffic disappeared. I'm still keeping an eye out for it, but so far we're clear. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but anyone in small business knows that a penny lost to fraud is a penny better spent on promotion.
With that in mind, I'd like to offer the following Five Tips for Combating Click Fraud:
- Avoid second-tier advertising networks. Stick with the Big Three.
- Opt out of international placements and content-network placements in your campaigns. If you can't do this (Boohoo Search Marketing, I'm looking at you) then carefully consider your ad spend.
- Vary text between different PPC providers, so you can track sources.
- Watch your server logs for suspect traffic.
- Immediately suspend any account that generates suspect traffic. Print a copy of the server log and keep it in case you need to file a claim for a refund.
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