Currency issues

I previously talked about my switch from selling in US$ to Euros. I also asked some people on 'Joel on Software' what they think about the currencies. I was rather startled by the response. It seems that especially US residents want the price in their currency displayed directly on the website. I'm so used to working in other currencies that I personally don't care what currency is displayed, as long as I can switch to my own when ordering.

So I thought it would be a good idea to put a US$ amount on my website. Of course, it would be a little hard to display a changing amount. So the best thing to do was to set the US$ price fixed and use that amount. I'm not that fond of using a fixed US$ amount. Exchange rates can really mess things up. But it's always nice to get extra sales, so I finally decided to do it.

Plimus changed my idea however. Apparently, when you use a different base currency, you can set all currencies to a fixed amount, except US$. US$ just isn't available for setting a fixed currency. Plimus figures you use US$ as a base currency anyway, so it's always fixed right? I contacted Plimus tech support and they said they will implement this 'feature' (I'd call it a bug). I'm curious how long it will take so that I can finally put a US$ amount on my website.

Adwords Tuning

I'm sure you've read hundreds of blogs and articles regarding tuning your Google Adwords campaign. I sure have. So I won’t bother you with the latest ‘tips and tricks’.

I've been using Adwords since October, and it turns out I was using it all wrong. Well, that might be exaggerating. Adwords did result in more sales, but I spend way too much on the campaigns without getting the proper results. It wasn't until I enabled Google Analytics that I saw the problem. So I changed my campaigns at the beginning of this month. Result? A drastic cutback in sales. Oops, I might have done something wrong here. Side note: the cutback in sales was not all due to the change in Adwords. February is a typical bad month for me. I'm wondering what the Choosen Hairy Irish has to say about this, but his blog hasn't been updated for a while.

So I'm constantly tuning my campaigns now to get the best out of it. Trying multiple add texts, and multiple campaigns to see which works best. Some parts of AdWords are still not clear to me. I never thought I could spend this much of my time on it. But hey, it is pretty important.