Floyd’s Thoughts…

This is a little story about a wonderful product called DropBox.

I have been using DropBox for a while and today I noticed that i’m using about 50% of the 2GB you get for FREE (yeah! it’s pretty generous!), for some reason I had an urge to click the “Upgrade My DropBox” link that was looking back at me, Don’t ask me why, maybe it was good link placement by the DropBox guys or simply my own appreciation of the FREE plan that caused it, but true enough I clicked the link…

Upon clicking the link I was faced with a beautifully laid out screen offering me 50GB for $9.99 or 100GB for $19.99, I instantly clicked the 50GB option expecting to get a nice big DropBox only to be presented with a payment screen that “Required” me to go and get my credit card before i could continue! Now… call me lazy but this seems like a silly hurdle to put in front of a potential customer, especially one who is here entirely on impulse.

For this (seemingly daft) reason I’m not going to upgrade, after all I don’t actually “NEED” to upgrade yet I still have ~1GB left, but I wonder how many people just like me would have upgraded if the payment process had that magic little “Pay with PayPal” button on it… I know i would have.

For as long as the JRuby project has been going the jruby.com domain has been owned by a nasty little Domain Squatter, but recently the Company I Work For purchased the domain off the before mentioned toe-rag for a small fortune.

Today the domain is being send to it’s rightful resting place, that is, we are giving it to the JRuby project.

Hip Hip Hooray!

As part of my role at Component Workshop Ltd over the last 12 months I have been responsible for internet marketing of our Code Spaces product and in this time we have spent ~£20,000 on google adwords.

While I have not compiled the stats in a presentable form I can say without any doubt that bidding for the #1 spot on your given search phrase is not only expensive in comparison to the 2nd – 10th slots it also yields pretty disappointing results.

Recently I have been able to cut a third off our Google Adwords spend while retaining the same level of conversions by doing no more than excluding the #1 slot from our adword bids.

While I can’t fully explain why this phenomenon occurs my feeling is that as users of google we are instinctively drawn to the genuine search results verses the sponsored links and as the 2nd and 3rd placed sponsored links usually appear closer to the genuine search results we are naturally drawn to them rather than the #1 placed link.

Food for thought me thinks…