Google Adwords - The "What is it?" Guide for beginners

Google Adwords - is a paid online advertisement and management service from Google. It works as a marketing campaign tool that helps one to create Text/Image/Mobile ads and show those ads when someone searches for a "specific word/phrase" in google. The probability that Google will show the ads depends on how much you bid for a particular keyword.

Getting into Google Adwords is quite easy. Adwords has one of the best UI design among todays web services. Starting from signup. Every common doubts and questions are answered right on the screen in the form of Help snippets. One doesn't need to find a help doc or search the google again.

Their concept is like a Campaign can contain multiple Ads (google calls the advertisements as ad groups). For example, Nokia N-Series can be a campaign name which contains advertisements targeting N-Series phones. Now in the Nokia N-Series campaign, the campaign manager can create a series of ads viz. "Nokia N71", "Nokia N82" etc.



So, to start one should create a "Campaign" and then create "Ads for that campaign". During each ad creation, the keywords and bid price can be specified to start. Also you can specify budget for each ad/campaign and individual Bid amount for each keyword.

Creating a Text ad is pretty straight forward that uses a Wizard-flow structure. You can setup an advertisement in less than 2 minutes (if you are sure what your ad is and what are the keywords are)

Keyword setup is quite easy too. Write down all keywords one by one. Adwords also helps you to find and select keywords. It would take another blog post to explain all the process, but believe me.. it is not because it is difficult, it has too many options to offer complete control over your ad. :-)

The ads run immediately once you complete the process. Oh yes, I forgot to mention in the beginning during your Adwords Account setup, you will be given options to select the payment method. Based on your option google will debit the money from your account.

There are lot of websites and articles available to get you jumpstart with Google Adwords. Go through them and you will soon become a Adwords Expert or Adwords Consultant.

Though Google Adwords has so many good things, it has its own downsides too. On technical notes, adjusting the CPC and bidding is quite confusing. Beginners may find it difficult to understand a lot of terms, but in due course of time they will feel easy.

Also, Google Adwords seems to be costlier when you target many countries,especially USA. Careful planning and superior fund management along with optimized keywords should give you better results.

- Rajesh Sundaram

shaadi.com - bad customer service experience

It may be more than a month since I logged into shaadi.com. And today when I logged in, I got shocked to see that my profile has been discontinued. The reason? I don't know. But their alert page says :

Dear Rajesh Sundaram

Your membership on Shaadi.com has been discontinued due to one or more of the following reasons:

* You requested that the profile be deleted.
* The contents of your profile were found highly unlikely to be true.
* We received numerous complaints from other members regarding your conduct.
* You have used Shaadi.com for commercial purposes.
* You have violated the service agreement accepted by you when you became a member at Shaadi.com. You can read the agreement here.

If you have any concerns, questions or objections, feel free to contact us.

Regards,
Shaadi.com Customer Relations

I never received any notification email stating that my profile has been discontinued. Well, what they gonna lose if they send a small notification email prior to discontinuing a profile? Whatever could be the reason, it's a bad ethic to abruptly discontinue a profile and say "Okay here are a couple of possible reasons. Now you keep on guessing.". I really couldnt guess which one could be the reason.

:)

- Rajesh Sundaram

QuickShot - Designing a basic online word processor's User Interface - Part 1

Online Word Processors are becoming quite famous and handy nowadays. Starting with Google, Zoho and Thinkfree, many online services offers online word processors. And most of the them are free.

Generally Online Word Processors have the same features like the desktop word proccessors, but sans some advanced features like mail merge, advanced table editing, page layouts etc.

To decide the features that would make a Good online word processor, one should start with the objective/goals. For now, let us assume our Online Word Processor is capable of editing simple documents with basic features. To make it even more easy, lets say our OWP (Online Word Processor) is similar to Windows Write. Windows write a small and powerful tool to create basic documents and has enough features to do the common tasks.

Building the Features
For our OWP, lets take the following objectives first.

1. Capable of creating / editing documents in WYSIWYG format
2. Should handle multiple fonts and sizes
3. Create/Edit and Save document files
4. Basic editing features such as Copy, Paste, Find and Replace etc
5. Should be able to indent text, support bullet lists
6. Should support atleast A4 size papers with default margin of 1 inch.

Now considering the above objectives/features, let us list out the action functions that will be needed.

Related for Documents - New / Open / Save / Saves As / Quit
Related to Editing - Cut / Copy / Paste / Find / Find and Replace
Related to Formatting - Font name / Font size / Font Style / Indent / Lists

Contd.. in Part 2