Instrumental Music

Rankpulse has recorded another Google event about half the size of the last one but bigger than anything else in the last 6 months. Yes it is churn and more churn. Our Keywords roil and boil on an almost daily basis but our overall performance is pretty steady. I'm not sure if this isn't a new Google tactic to keep the spammers off balance and test user reactions to a variety of ranking algorithm settings. Our visitor numbers have come slightly off their peak levels but have held steadily well above previous heights. Customer orders are up too and so is our AdSense Content based advertising revenue. The task of re-formatting our streaming pages to allow inclusion of more advertising is well under way but it is a bit laborious. Once that is complete we'll go back and try to fix the AdSense Search facility so that it allows searches of our site. Then we can try deploying that more widely. As it is some one found it lurking on our site map yesterday and had a go.

As I have mentioned before Google's contract is a bit restrictive in terms of what can be disclosed about the arrangement. But I think a few comments are justified, although of course, they are personal comments based on the experience of just one site. From our first toe in the water experiments with individual ads on some pages we have in the last day or so moved to maximizing the advertising coverage where that can be done without compromising important page layout considerations. So apart from this blog we don't use the top of the page. We do use the right hand side where it doesn't interfere with our own product tables. If there is space at the end of our text we include the 'fat one' otherwise a single banner has been placed at the bottom of most product pages and all the streaming sample pages. We have even added the banner ads to our product pages in the shop below the action buttons because we know people do sit and listen to these samples for up to 30 s...

Well, our last post was not far off the mark - those levels of visits were sustained making June a record month and have in the last few days have been surpassed. The keyword re-focus and bounce reduction initiatives really appear to be paying off although there is still a lot of turbulence on individual keywords. Encouragingly buying behavior seems to be following the visitor activity and the e-commerce side of the site is functioning really well now. We are planning to move home soon and there will be some disruption to the creative side of the business while we get settled in. But we are going to take the opportunity to upgrade some of our equipment and possibly software before we produce more recordings. The dual processor PCs are looking very good value now and the 100% increase in memory, not to mention the large caches should mean that we will not hit processor constraints with our instrument emulation software as often as we do now.