Jeff Vanlaningham

I wanted to take a moment to discuss a product we carry here at RealTruck.com.  Putco PURE LED Interior Lights.  Being the Vice President of a Truck Accessory company, I am often asked if I would like to try a new product for my truck.  Now I love to accessorise my truck and am always on the look out for the next “cool” thing.  But I tend to focus on the outside of my truck.   Grille Guards, Nerf Bars,  Tonneau Covers.  As for lights, I certainly have tried my fair share of Tailgate bars, Third brake lights and even a front light bar that kind of looks like the front of the Knight Rider car, but interior lights have never been high on my list because I didnt really see the value in them.  Wow, was I wrong.  I recently was asked by a friend to try these out and I would like to share my thoughts on this product.

Install Time:  2 minutes and that includes the 30 seconds I was channel surfing on the radio station.  Install is literally a breeze and trust me when I tell you that if I can do it, anyone can do this.

Actual Interior Lighting:  I could not believe the difference these LED lights made in the cab of my pickup.  Excuse the cliche, but it is a “night and day” difference between these and my factory lights.  These dont just add a bit more light, they give you maximum visibility and illuminate every inch of your interior.

However, the best part for me (being more concerned with the outside of the vehicle like I told you before) is when you come out to parking lot and unlock your vehicle with a remote.  Never again will you waste any time trying to find your vehicle in a crowded parking lot.  As soon as you hit the remote and your vehicles dome lights kick on, you will know exactlywhere you are parked.  The cool moon-like glow that now engulfs my truck and the parking spot make it impossible to miss.  I have had these in for a month now and have received no less than 12 positive comments, which by truck accessory standards would make that a record.  Oh and by the way, they will last for about 100 years after you have decided to get a new vehicle.  This is not meant to be a sales pitch, just a observation from someone who works with and around a lot of Truck Accessories.  The LED premium Interior Lights are a great buy.

Almost every line from Tombstone:

“I’m your Huckleberry”

“Your no daisy”

“You called down the Thunder, well now you’ve got it!  The law is coming! You tell them I’m coming….and Hell’s coming with me!  ( I had to stop typing after this one and take a few breaths, over dose of coolness)

 

Outlaw Josey Wales

Dyin’ ain’t much of a livin’, boy.

 

Josey Wales: When I get to likin’ someone, they ain’t around long.
Lone Watie: I notice when you get to DISlikin’ someone they ain’t around for long neither.

 

Don’t piss down my back and tell me its raining

 

Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?

 

Jamie: I wish we had time to bury them fellas.
Josey Wales: To hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat, same as worms.

 

Old School

You’re my boy Blue!!

 

Escape from New York

“Call me Snake”

 

Blues Brothers

Elwood: : It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tanks of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses.

Jake: Hit it.

 

Smokey and the Bandit

Im gonna barbeque yo ass in molasses

 

Saturday Night Fever

Would ya just watch the hair. Ya know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it. He hits my hair.

 

Back to the Future

Last night, Darth Vader came down from planet Vulcan and told me that if I didn’t take Lorraine out that he’d melt my brain.

 

Animal House

 D-Day: War’s over, man. Wormer dropped the big one.
 Bluto: Over? Did you say “over”? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
 Otter: Germans?
 Boon: Forget it, he’s rolling.

 

Zero point two… Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

 

 Life of Brian

Excuse me. Are you the Judean People’s Front?
F*ck off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea

 

First Blood

Vagrancy wasn’t it? That’s gonna look real good on his grave stone in Arlington: Here lies John Rambo, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, survivor of countless incursions behind enemy lines. Killed for vagrancy in Jerkwater, USA.

So, it was back to school for my 20^th High School Reunion in Minot, ND.  I was not able to make my 10 year due to the birth of our first child, so this was the first time back to the old stomping ground.  I’m not going to lie, I had a lot of reservations about going.  It’s been a long time, I have not stayed in touch with hardly anyone.  I had all kinds of excuses.  Here are some myths I had:

 

 

I won’t remember anyone’s name:  False.  I only had to look at a nametag once.  It all just came flooding back in and I remembered everyone.

 

You have to sit through long boring stories of where people are at.   Most of the people you see, you give each other a quick 5 minute bio.  Where you live, married, what you do, kids.  End with “good to see you” and keep moving.

 

My ‘group” won’t be there or the people I hung out with won’t be there.  At your 20 year, there are no more groups, clicks, clubs or anything else.  You are all just veterans of the class.

 

It’s  just a one up type show where everyone is trying to impress everyone.  I didn’t get this at all.  (Although, if you do find yourself with one of these types of people, here is a great way to cool them off.  Tell them that their shirt is the same color as your Mercedes. ) 

 

It was so long ago, it doesn’t really matter anymore.  It was a long time ago, but those are crucial years in a persons life and the people you go through them with are a big part of your makeup.

 

My anxieties were totally undeserving (as is the case with most anxieties)  I had a great time getting to see old friends and catch up on where everyone is at now.    If you get the chance to go to yours, take my advice and go.

 

The class of “89” is doing fine.

So as part of RealTruck’s  office promotion from last month, each full time employee got a free spray tanning session.  I used mine tonight and wanted to share my experience on this.  So before going in you are supposed to shower and exfoliate.  I guess you are supposed to do this 4 hours before,  I did mine 1 hour before.  I know, I am a rule breaker.  So when I get there, the first thing they do is bring you into a room and tell you to rub some kind of lotion on the areas where the “spray tan” stuff can accumulate.  Elbows, Knees, wrist and so on.  So you dis-robe to your comfort level and then call the technician in.  I chose to go with shorts that were rolled up, no shirt.  The nice young lady comes in and grabs what looks like one of those spray guns they use to paint cars.  She asks me if i want her to darken up the mixture for a deeper tan.  Sure, why not.  At this point she tells me that I was supposed to be wearing the sandals when i step on the mat.  I am not wearing any shoes and have accumulated a thick layer of tanning solution on my feet.  So for the next week, the bottom of my feet will look like I have been playing in a dirty field.  Oh well.  After getting the proper shoes, she begins to spray me down.  Almost seems like a bad Hokey Pokey at times. Put your right foot forward, put your right foot back.  Now shake it all around.  So, she sprays both legs, then moves up to the torso.  Then the face and it all ends with the back.  Total time was about 10 minutes.  Sure thats a long time for me to be holding in my gut, but I made it through.  All in all, I found this to be a pretty good deal.  I am not as dark as I thought I would be but I also dont have that orange oompa loompa “Donald Trump” look either.  Would I do it again, yeah I think so.  It only cost about $15.00 and I should be good for about a week.  Its natural looking and people dont have to put on their sunglasses to look at me in shorts. 

I wanted to take some time to write about something I do for my job.  Google Ad Words.  Now as you will quickly learn, I am far from an expert, but I have been running a large account for over a year now and there are some basic strategies that I wanted to share that might help you beginners.  For the purpose of this article, I am going to assume the reader knows the basics.  If not a great start up tutorial can be found here

What type of Keywords to bid on:

For starters, you have three basic keyword searches that you can use.  A broad match, a phrase match and an exact match.  Say you bid on the keyword  “leather jacket” .  If you go with a broad match, anything that Google thinks is relevant will show up.  So while you are bidding on leather jacket, you could be showing under bath robe or apron.  Broad match gives you a ton of impressions but a poor CTR (more on that later) and a lot of garbage clicks in my opinion.  When I first started out, I had every keyword in our account on broad match.  It is almost impossible to get a good gauge on what your account and your consumers are really doing since you don’t actually know what the keyword they clicked on.  Whenever you go to set up an Ad words account or a new ad group, the default setting is broad match.  Ultimately, the one who benefits the most from this is Google themselves as more clicks mean more revenue for them.  Please don’t think I am knocking Google, I have the utmost respect for them as a company.  But they need to make money just like the rest of us and are going to set up this program to be beneficial to them first.  So what I did next was go from one extreme to another and switched all our keywords to an exact match.  You do this by actually adding brackets like [this] around the keyword.  This tells Google that you are only bidding on that exact match term.  This has its advantages.  You eliminate a ton of garbage clicks.  Your CTR (Click through Rate) will go up, which can help with what you are actually charged per click.  However, you are also missing a lot of potential clicks.  Let’s say you are bidding on Leather Jacket with an exact match.  Here are some terms you could be missing out on:  Black Leather Jacket, Cool Looking Leather Jacket, buy leather jacket.  You get the point.  When I switched everything over to exact match, there were some benefits but ultimately our traffic went down.  So what to do?  Enter Phrase match.  Phrase match is activated when you put quotations like “this” around a word.  Now let’s search the term “leather jacket”.  All the examples I gave earlier would be trigged because the phrase Leather Jacket is part of the search.  But it must have that phrase in it to be triggered.  Hence eliminating Google taking liberty with your keyword and showing whatever they think is relevant.   My current setup is about 95% phrase match with some broad and exact matches sprinkled in.  If you would like to know more about when to use those, just drop me a line and I would be happy to discuss that with you. 

 

What are some good measuring sticks of success?

I have had a lot of different answers to this question and am just going to share my basic experience on what I go after.  I am going to assume you are selling on your site and tracking conversions. 

So let’s take a basic account and look for some metrics.  Campaign A sells widgets.  Its daily budget is $50 a day.  In this campaign we have 25 ad groups that average 20 keywords each.  (Try not to let your keywords exceed 30 per ad group as this starts to confuse the Google machine)

At the end of two weeks this is how your stats look:

Campaign Name              Budget                 Clicks    Imp        CTR        Avg CPC   Cost   Conv Rate           Convs

Campaign A                        $50/day                243         16307    1.49%    $.29        $70.61   .41%                      1

 

Some people will tell you that a 1% Click through Rate is good (in fact, Google themselves told me this) I don’t buy it.  If you are only reaching 1% of the searches, that is unacceptable.  I want my campaigns to have at least a 3% CTR.  That’s low end and I have many that are well above 10% on the CTR.  So what to do about that.  Well there are several things that you can check for:

·         Is there one really broad keyword that is affecting my overall performance. 

·         Am I bidding high enough on certain keywords.  Looking at this example, I would be quick to look at that as .29 cents is great but you may need to push it up to gain better visibility

·         Do my ads make me want to click them?  Do a search of some terms and compare how your ads look to your competitors. What is good about theirs that yours is missing?  Fix it , Re-write it and always, always have at least two or three ads running so A/B test.

·         Do I have the content network turned on?  If so, turn it off and start a new campaign for just the content network on its own.  Never run them together.

How about a conversion rate of .41%, is that good?  Well it depends on your site, but the quick answer is NO, that is not good.  You should have at least a 1% conversion rate.  What to do about that.  Well lets assume your website is laid out well and you are priced competitively.  You cant fix web errors with Ad words.  Assuming that is all good, then check these things:

·         What page am I bringing them in to.  Consumers don’t want to have to work to find what they want.  If they searched Widget, bring them in to the widget page not your home page

·         Is my term I am bidding on pertinent to what the consumer wants.  IF I typed in Red, electric widget, then bring me in to that page that sells Red, electric widgets.  Or a term like free widgets.  Perhaps I should not be bidding on this term since its likely this person is not looking to buy.

So lets say we optimize this campaign and look at some of these factors.  Here is how I would want it to look in a few weeks:

Campaign Name              Budget                 Clicks    Imp        CTR        Avg CPC   Cost   Conv Rate           Convs

Campaign A                        $50/day                208         3902       5.33%    $.30        $61.41   1.44%                    3

So that’s some basic Ad words 101.  Some other random thoughts that you might want to look into:

·         You can adjust your bidding by times of day or days of week

·         You can turn your bidding off during hours that don’t perform well and set when it comes back on

·         Look into Keyword Substitution Ads for better CTR

·         Be wary of programs that claim they can monitor your competition. 

·         Use Vanity Display URLs in your ads..I.E  www.mysite.com/widget

Ok, enough of this, I would love to hear any best practices that you have had.  If you have any questions, drop me a line.

 

Jeff V

I will be posting update about my life, my family and general comments on such things as movies, TV, politics, music and more.  My wife Heidi will also be sharing her musings as well as plenty of pictures of my children Mark, Abby and Ella.

 

For now, please check out where I work at www.realtruck.com